Three books have been published about George Quaintance, not counting the 2014 ebook.
The first — although not chronologically — is a version of the biography I co-authored with John Waybright. In the end stages of John's life, in 2013, a friend of his paid to have about 20 paperback copies of our book privately printed. It was to be a birthday surprise for John. The finished book was about 6x9 inches, 142 pages, and had several glossy plates, some of which were in full color.
That friend's accomplice, however, acquired an early, uncorrected and incomplete version of the manuscript. John passed away before he saw it, or knew about it. (Thank goodness!) I have a copy and I hope that no one else does.
The second book, The Art of George Quaintance, appeared in three editions, all with different covers and slightly different contents.
In 1989, Volker Janssen of Janssen Verlag (Publishers) published The Art of George Quaintance in an edition of 1000 copies. It has a pale blue cover featuring Spartan Soldiers Bathing. The text is in German. At that time, Janssen owned several works by Quaintance, so he exhibited them at his gallery in Berlin. Hoping to sidestep any possible copyright issues with the Quaintance estate, he used that exhibition as a pretext for including photos in the book of every one of Quaintance's known paintings of the male physique era.
As Janssen explained in an email to me, "I had the opportunity to purchase some rare original Quaintance paintings and photographs, and as a result the first Quaintance exhibition finally took place in Berlin, in 1989. The first book of his work, The Art of George Quaintance, was published, and it became the catalogue for the show."
In cooperation with the publishing house Bruno Gmünder, a second edition of 2,000 copies of The Art of George Quaintance was printed in 1990. It has a yellow cover with the image of the kneeling boy hugging a donkey that also appeared on the cover of Physique Pictorial and as a greeting card.
A third and final edition was printed in 2003. It has a full-color cover depicting Sunrise, an original canvas that Janssen owned at the time, on the front cover. One thousand copies were printed. All three editions were oversized (9x12 inches) paperbacks; there were no hardcover editions.
The third Quaintance book is the full-color, hardcover, coffee-table book, Quaintance, published by Taschen in 2010. I wrote the descriptions and commentaries for the paintings in that book. Today, copies in good condition routinely sell for many times the original price of $100. There was only the single edition and the number of copies printed is a trade secret.
What's curious are the extremely high prices being asked for the Janssen books at booksellers and online sources (e.g., Amazon and eBay). All three Janssen editions are not particularly scarce, and copies are not hard to find. Are buyers and sellers confusing the Taschen book with the Janssen book? Sellers routinely interchange the titles: you may see the Taschen book called The Art of George Quaintance and the Janssen book referred to as George Quaintance or Quaintance. Just recently I located a copy of the Taschen volume offered for $100 and a 2nd edition of the Janssen book offered for $625! Happy hunting.
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