From Freud to Bicycling Monks

After 45 pictorial years, the Bettmann Archive is sold

A harried advertising executive was on the phone, demanding a print of the Mona Lisa. Since he was talking to Manhattan's Bettmann Archive Inc., which has more than 5 million pictorial representations covering every subject from cave painting to moon walking, he had certainly called the right place. Did he want black and white or color? "I don't want the usual thing!" barked the adman. "How about a side view?" It was one of the few requests that the archive has ever been unable to fill.

The archive was founded in 1936 with two steamer trunks of old prints brought out of Nazi Germany by a scholarly, enterprising Jewish immigrant named Otto Bettmann. Since then, Bettmann, who has a Ph.D. in history from the university of his native Leipzig, has built it into one of the nation's leading suppliers of historical illustrations to book publishers, magazines, television and films. Some of the archive's vast repository has even showed up on T shirts and cereal boxes. Last week the founder--now a dapper, energetic 77--and Hans P. Kraus, a Manhattan rare-book dealer, announced that the Bettmann Archive was being sold to the Kraus-Thomson Organization Ltd., a small international publishing firm.

For Bettmann the sale is not a misty-eyed occasion. "I hate nostalgia," he says, stroking his neat, silver goatee, "but I've made a hell of a living from it." Indeed, one of the nine books he wrote or collaborated on is titled The Good Old Days--They Were Terrible. Bettmann is one of those rare creatures, an optimistic humanist. His belief that the world is not going directly to ruin has led to one of the main reasons for the archive's success: historical pictures add a depth of understanding to current events. Explains Bettmann: "Why show students protesting at Berkeley? Everyone's seen that. We've got a woodcut of Yale students rioting a hundred years ago. That tells you something."

The archive flourished with the rise of photojournalism and the launching of magazines like LIFE and Look during the 1930s. "Unlike Europeans, Americans are insatiable for their own history visually," says Bettmann. "They were discovering themselves in these photos." One of his first big tasks was to select 300 pictures for an editor planning a world history. Bettmann delivered in three weeks, from prehistoric times through World War I.

Nowadays, nearly half of the 50 requests that reach the archive daily are from advertising firms. A dozen specialists rummage through the archive's 5,000 major categories ("itching," "mothers-in-law," "strange births") in search of the usual ("Send me everything on marijuana") and the unusual (a picture of a stained-glass window showing monks riding bicycles). Requests for pictures that the staff believes to be nonexistent are met with gentle regrets. Among the most frequently sought-after: the sinking of the Titanic, the Earl of Sandwich eating a sandwich, and the elusive Gabriel Fahrenheit, developer of the thermometric scale, an authentic picture of whom would earn a $1,000 reward from the archive. Fees for the archive's service (exclusive of royalties) can range from $50 to $3,000.

The most often requested subject is Sigmund Freud. "He outsells Jesus," says Bettmann. He makes the remark with some distaste, since he holds psychology responsible for what he considers the deplorable contemporary cult of personality. "Photography today is all closeups," he notes. "All surfaces. Look at Mathew Brady's work. It had a lovely murkiness, style, flavor. He captured souls."

Bettmann has always been a discerning judge of quality, discarding most of the 100,000 photos he reviewed each year for possible inclusion in the collection. "You could start your own archive from my wastebasket," he says. But one would need the key to the complicated and precise Bettmann cataloguing system, which, he claims with a smile, "is based on Bach. It's all in the music." As it happens, Bettmann, now retired in Florida, plans to devote his time to his "hang-up," a biography of Bach. "I'm a scholar, a bookman," he says. "I am not personally crazy about visual media."

He thinks the archive will do just fine without him. "Maybe in 50 years no one will be able to read--hen the collection will be more valuable than ever," he suggests. "Human history is like being a pilgrim to Jerusalem--two steps forward, one back. And folks worry about technology. Personally, I like it. When I can't sleep, I listen to Bach on my Sony Walkman. That's progress." And that's the real side view from Bettmann.

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