Title: Ancient Copies
Artist: Oliver Laric
Publisher: self-published
Format: 24.5 x 19 cm, bootleg re-issue
ISBN: none
Oliver Laric’s Ancient Copies is a re-issued bootleg publication of a Margaret Bieber’s Ancient Copies: Contributions to the History of Greek and Roman Art from 1977. Bieber was an extraordinary woman. Born in 1879, she was forced out of her archaeology professorship in Germany in 1933 – she was Jewish. She fled to Oxford, and later to the United States. She was 54 when she lost her first career, an age many of us aspire to retire at, but not Bieber. Before her exile she had started working with a colleague on a book about Roman copies of Greek statues. Her colleague died in the Nazi maelstrom, and she did not get around to finishing the book until she was close to 100 years old (although meanwhile she had published many others, including one about the Laocoon and its copies). The first printed copies of Ancient Copies reached her in 1977, not long before she died.
Laric has presumably seized on Bieber’s message that Roman copies were Roman art in their own right, and has, by the admission of the bumph-sheet available on the stand, produced a self-published bootleg, a modern copy of Ancient Copies. Being print-on-demand, it doesn’t suffer from the “copy 1 of n copies” constraints of a limited edition.