GATES SNAPS TOP PIX

By Jesse Birnbaum

IT WAS A MARRIAGE MADE IN CYBERheaven. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who amassed his fortune by anticipating the computer future, announced last week that he had bought the incomparable archive of Otto Bettmann, who made his fortune excavating the photographic past. The value of the deal was not disclosed, but it was estimated to be millions of dollars.

With that single stroke, Gates captured one of the world's great collections of documentary images: more than 16 million drawings, artworks, news photographs and other illustrations, including such familiar and haunting treasures as Mathew Brady's Civil War pictures and the photos of Rosa Parks' lonely bus ride. The deal immediately raised questions about whether Gates, who has near monopoly control of the PC software industry and is moving aggressively into computer networking, is planning to extend his dominion into graphic images as well.

Not so, says a spokesman. The Archive was purchased not by Microsoft but by a separate Gates-owned company, Corbis, which will transform the paper-based collection into digital form using high-speed scanners. The images could be available for a modest fee to home and office computers, online services, CD-ROMs and media not yet invented.

Universal accessibility was pretty much what Bettmann had in mind when he started his picture-lending library nearly 50 years ago. The son of a German-Jewish surgeon, Bettmann was 12 when he began collecting discarded medical illustrations from his father's wastebasket. As curator of rare books at the Berlin State Arts Museum, he began obsessively photographing illustrations, lithographs, old prints and any other images within focal reach of his Leica. In 1935 Bettmann fled Nazi Germany for the U.S. with $5 and his father's best suit. He also took with him two steamer trunks of exposed 35-mm film. This trove grew into what Bettmann, a courtly scholar as well as a clever businessman, proudly merchandised as a "complete history of civilization."

Setting up shop in New York City, Bettmann rented out his reproductions for one-time use to publishers, educators, scholars, ad agencies, and later to television and movie studios, charging fees ranging from $50 to $3,000. At the same time he kept buying news pictures and photographic libraries, cataloging them by an arcane system that Bettmann insisted was based on the intricate complexities of a Bach fugue. "It's all in the music," he said with a twinkle in his eyes.

If a client needed an illustration of Freud (once the most popular request) or Jesus (less so) or perhaps Washington's wooden dentures, Bettmann ferreted it out of his filing cabinets. Only rarely did he disappoint, as when a pasta manufacturer wanted a drawing of Jefferson eating spaghetti. (The Archives for years offered a reward of $1,000 for an illustration of the Earl of Sandwich eating a sandwich.)

In 1981 Bettmann sold his business to a small publishing firm and retired to Florida. For him, the sale was an occasion of satisfaction without sentiment."I hate nostalgia," he said, "but I've made a hell of a living from it." So have his successors, who have continued to make the Bettmann credit line ubiquitous in print. Now a few taps on the computer keyboard will bring it to the screen. That prospect pleases the 92-year-old Bettmann, who pronounced himself delighted "to have seen my original acorn nourished and cultivated into a formidable digitized oak."

--Reported by David Bjerklie/New York and Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles

With reporting by DAVID BJERKLIE/NEW YORK AND PATRICK E. COLE/LOS ANGELES