While individual designers are acknowledged, it is obvious that a standard format has been used. High-quality photography appears throughout the books, much of it, I suspect, produced for these publications. This is especially apparent with the images of the decorative arts objects, with fashion and textiles, furniture, ceramics and silver – much of it not reproduced before – carefully arranged to capture important characteristics and qualities. While I have always disliked deep-etched images of objects because it appears to leave them floating on the page, the extensive use of computer-generated shadows almost always overcomes this problem. Scale, always difficult to manage in books with a mixture of small and large objects, has been thoughtfully handled, although the de Kooning Standing figure (1969) might have been best omitted if it could not have been made to look as large and impressive a sculpture as it is.

The careful selection of details, often showing the work at full scale, helps to establish a visual unity throughout the books. They also give the reader a greater understanding of size, texture and colour. Fortunately, they are not always the expected details. In the figure of God from the St George slaying the dragon (c. 1431), attributed to Uccello, we see God and, more importantly, the incised and gilded background. For Asian art, the details of paintings show the mastery of energetic calligraphy or minute detailing, while those of bronzes and ceramics concentrate on texture and painted imagery, and direct the reader to further subtleties. In some instances, particularly in European painting, the inclusion of Cuyp’s cow’s backside, Regnault’s spilled pearls and Duncan Grant’s embracing wrestlers suggests that the designer or curator was having some fun.

Serving as an introduction and a more specialised source of information about works of art in a collection can give souvenir books a schizophrenic quality. Many collection-based books are too large and expensive, and are produced as promotional publications rather than souvenir books of genuine interest to the public. (Of these, the National Gallery of Australia’s recent gargantuan offering and the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s glamorous coffee-table book both look like corporate ‘brag’ books.) Others present the same old collection favourites with a slight text that makes no attempt to seduce the reader with either new ideas or images. Instead of thinking about the very specific purpose of a souvenir book and producing one that will sell out quickly and allow for the production of a new replacement, the museum ends up with dead stock. Fortunately, the NGV books do not belong to this category.

Considering the breadth and occasional depth of the NGV’s international collection, the selection of works in these books has been carried out carefully. Each includes what we might think of as the most important works from a particular collection and, in some instances, some works we had almost forgotten to be part of the collection. How good it is to see The Garden of Love (c.1465–70), from the studio of Vivarini. After years of being consigned to storage because of its poor condition, this wonderfully eccentric painting has been restored and is once again one of the unexpected delights of the collection. But there are some odd omissions. Is the powerful neo-Sumerian Head of Gudea (c.2100 BC) no longer thought to be quite right? And were three Rodin’s considered de trop, resulting in Balzac being sacrificed? While I understand that choices have to be made, to leave out such masterpieces in favour of lesser works is a mistake.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the book devoted to prints and drawings (Prints and Drawings by Cathy Leahy et al., NGV, $39.95 pb, 135 pp). From such an outstanding collection, the souvenir book should be a celebration of the very best and most famous, with some oddities to show unexpected aspects of the collection. However, the selection seems to have gone sadly amiss in this volume. Too often, masterful technique or an obscure work has been celebrated in favour of masterpieces. When the collection of prints by Dürer and Rembrandt is so celebrated, to fail to include more of the better-known examples is unfortunate. A souvenir book should have included Dürer’s prints St Eustace (1501) and Adam and Eve (1504), and Rembrandts such as Three trees (1643), The hundred guilder print (c.1649), and Christ crucified between the two thieves (after 1653), instead of a scrappy drawing taking up two pages and a recently presented etching; likewise, Bonnard’s La promenade des nourrices, Frise de fiacres (1899) and Picasso’s beautiful drawing Woman with fan (1904). Too many minor and insignificant works are given too much space in this book. A souvenir book is not the place for a curator to celebrate a donor, a recent acquisition or to score scholarly points showing off arcane knowledge.

Thoughtful texts in most of the books introduce the reader to the nature of each collection. As well as an account of the history and aesthetic merit of individual works, entries include a little of the artist’s relevant career and sometimes the history of a work’s provenance and acquisition. Ideally, each book might give the reader a sense of the history and development of art in the subject’s geographic area, the period or the media. The best continuity can be found in the books devoted to the more obviously unified tradition of Western art, especially painting and sculpture (Painting and Sculpture before 1800 by Ted Gott and Laurie Benson, NGV, $39.95 pb, 135 pp; 19^th Century Painting and Sculpture by Ted Gott and Laurie Benson, NGV, $39.95 pb, 135 pp; 20^th Century Painting and Sculpture by Ted Gott and Laurie Benson, NGV, $39.95 pb, 135 pp). At times, particularly when writing about contemporary art, more judicious editing might have clarified language that most souvenir book readers will find obscure and too specialised.

The most difficult books to select and write have obviously been those devoted to ancient civilisations and Asian art. In both instances, the results are good. I especially enjoyed the book devoted to Asian art (Asian Art by Mae Anna Pang, NGV, $39.95 pb, 127 pp), because it included so many works on paper that have been so seldom exhibited or reproduced, and because its text frequently explains complex aspects of Asian art with exemplarily simple and direct language. In Ancient Civilizations in the International Collections of the National Gallery of Victoria (Amanda Dunsmore et al., NGV, $39.95 pb, 127 pp), Egyptian and Greek antiquities are expected, but the inclusion of some extraordinarily beautiful and previously seldom seen objects from Central and South American cultures is a great bonus.

While I might have expected Decorative Arts (Christopher Menz and Margaret Legge, NGV, $39.95 pb, 127 pp) and Fashion and Textiles (Robyn Healy, NGV, $39.95 pb, 127 pp) to be less able to supply a cohesive account, they both manage to be exceptionally good at relating useful and everyday objects to artistic periods and styles. Perhaps because the decorative arts are frequently not considered as fine art, the authors seem to be at pains to point out how the everyday might reflect the supposedly more important themes of painting and sculpture. In particular, Robyn Healy’s selection and account of the history and development of fashion and textiles deserves to be recognised as one of the best books produced by a museum as an introduction to the art of fashion and textiles. It begins with examples from the little-known collection of Coptic textiles and ends with some truly bizarre examples of contemporary fashion. Along the way, Italian lace and French embroidery, corsets and bathing suits, all help to place the story of Western cultural achievement in wider context. It is a brilliant justification for the existence of one of the NGV’s most interesting collections.

Biographical and catalogue details are an important aspect of souvenir books, especially when this information is so seldom available in book or online form from most Australian museums. Throughout these books, standard and useful conventions have been followed. In particular, the catalogue details for the decorative arts offer much more information than most books of this kind ever do, and in a format that accords the artist, designer and manufacturer due importance. It is then rather quaint to see that for paintings and sculpture a less up-to-date format for describing an artist’s country has been used. Readers might find it surprising to have Jacob Epstein described as American, when almost his entire working life was spent in England. The inclusion of pertinent biographical information in captions would create space for more valuable interpretative information in the text.

Apropos the history of souvenir books from the NGV, Ursula Hoff’s The National Gallery of Victoria, published by Thames & Hudson in 1973, set an enviable standard at a time when such books were non-existent in Australia. Fourteen years later, Ann Galbally’s The Collections of the National Gallery of Victoria offered many more illustrations and more information, but looked like a dog’s breakfast, suffering from what can only be described as remarkably bad design. With these new books, the NGV attains for its publications an international standard. They show that book design is a fine art worthy of an art museum’s attention.