Designing Exhibitions: Museums, Heritage, Trade and World Fairs (2nd ed.)

Citation

James, S. (2002), "Designing Exhibitions: Museums, Heritage, Trade and World Fairs (2nd ed.)", Library Review, Vol. 51 No. 9, pp. 484-485. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2002.51.9.484.9

We can justifiably claim many professional merits, but traditionally, although with a few outstanding exceptions, we are not good at selling ourselves. Over many years we could point to numerous good and successful library‐based exhibitions, but there have also been many failures; there remain many uninspired displays, and even if we are doing quite well there is always room for improvement. Professional advice can be expensive, and therefore, since many libraries now find it necessary rather than just beneficial to display themselves or their collections, and must do so in the face of stiff competition, this book by a consulting professional exhibition designer is likely to be a good investment.

What you are buying here is 40 years’ experience in design of exhibitions of all kinds, the author latterly (since the first edition of his manual) being a freelance consultant following a long career in museums and other institutions. That experience is distilled into a very practical manual covering the entire range of the exhibition design process. It starts with an overview of the exhibition itself, looking at their many different types and purposes and so emphasizing the need to start by defining what a proposed exhibition is for and what it is hoped to achieve. Roles of those involved and the preliminaries are described in chapters on “The designer,” “The client,” and “The brief”. An important chapter on interpretation of the display, The Words, precedes six chapters on practical “how to” and “what to” aspects: “The principles,” “The techniques,” “The design,” “The production,” “The completion,” “The maintenance”. A final chapter deals with “The end result” – did it work, how do you know, how do you evaluate it? The book is completed by a useful bibliography, a thorough glossary and an index.

This is very much a practical manual, full of ideas and their applications – what to do, why to do it, and how to do it – and all backed up by numerous examples of all kinds of exhibitions and displays. It is down to earth and in places refreshingly simplistic and basic. The text is practical, concise and clear, free of unnecessary jargon (and necessary jargon is defined in the glossary). Keywords in the text are highlighted in bold to make reference quicker and easier: this is very much a book to be consulted in practical working situations. It is comprehensively illustrated by line drawings and monochrome photographs: some of these come out a bit dark and fuzzy in reproduction but they serve their purpose.

We need to make exhibitions of ourselves more often, and by giving us advice from the commercial, museum and heritage sectors this practical manual will help us do so more effectively. Library exhibitions are nowhere specifically mentioned (although exhibitions with too much text are referred to as “books on legs”) but that is actually a bonus. Other books deal with library displays specifically: what is so valuable about this book is the nature and source of the advice from a consultant in other sectors of exhibition design which will help us compete on more equal terms.