FPM THIRTY YEARS SUPPLEMENT, 1992–2022
46
PAUL XUEREB
THE FLIGHT OF THE PUBLISHING WING
RESEARCH
YEARS OF
When Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti was founded in 1992, it aimed to reveal the wealth of artistic and cultural material existing in private collections through exhibitions, utilising these and other activities to encourage and publicise research on many aspects of the history and remains of the Maltese Islands. Since 1994, its much-admired journal published three times a year, Treasures of Malta, has been another tool for spreading knowledge about Malta’s heritage. Meanwhile, Patrimonju’s first single-volume publications included well-illustrated and scholarly catalogues of the exhibitions it organised, such as Antique Maltese Clocks, or the immensely successful exhibitions of The Silver of Malta, and Costume in Malta—the catalogues of which are edited by experts and have remained important reference works. The importance of scholarly catalogues to introduce a field of studies to non-experts was testified to across the years, even in later publications such as the catalogue of one of Patrimonju’s most exciting and recent exhibitions, Music in Malta, which confirms Dr Anna Borg Cardona as the great expert on the subject, just as Francesca Balzan, whose role in Patrimonju is noteworthy, had evidenced her expertise through the exhibition and accompanying catalogue on jewellery in Malta. It is of great satisfaction for publishers of researched works to attract good scholars to their publishing list. At first, Patrimonju had its own established author whose numerous, well-written works it could publish successfully. Dr Giovanni Bonello has become a byword for an astonishingly prolific writer of quality works, among which are his long series on Histories of Malta or other articles, chapters and volumes based on his huge collection
of early photographs of Malta and Gozo. When acting as Patrimonju’s General Editor, it was he who asked the British expert on photographic history, Margaret Harker, to write for Patrimonju the standard work on the photographic history of Malta in the nineteenth century—a fine work with which the publishing wing of Patrimonju inaugurated the new century. During my own four-year editorship at Patrimonju, it was of great satisfaction for me to help the well-known German scholar Thomas Freller, a specialist on Maltese history, to write what is, to my knowledge, the only volume about the Maltese Islands in world literature, a very substantial book that ought to be in every academic and scholarly library. To have an author publicly thank his editor for his ‘essential support’ is truly the most an editor can strive for. Among other notable publications which provided me with the unique opportunity to work closely with authors and editors—both for technical as well as academic support—were Francesco Menchetti’s Architects and Knights (2013), as well as The Bellanti Family (2010), for which I was able to engage Patricia Camilleri for a contribution on the archaeological work of Paolo Francesco Bellanti. Patrimonju has for several years had competitors in the publication of scholarly, lavishly illustrated and attentively designed books on Maltese art and history, but it is still going strong as evidenced by its most recent publication: Caroline Tonna’s great and beautiful tome on the portrait photographs taken by the nineteenth-century Maltese photographer Leandro Preziosi, or, a few years back, by Giovanni Bonello’s two weighty volumes—Valletta-Lost City—with their invaluable large collection of photographs of the city before its many changes during and after WWII, a book that speaks so well to old readers and astonishes many a younger one. For the scholar, the volume which might perhaps be most treasured is the work edited by two elderly and highly esteemed scholars: Albert Ganado and Antonio Espinosa Rodriguez in Encyclopaedia of Artists with a Malta Connection, a work that has immediately become essential for both students and seasoned researchers in the field of Maltese art history.
