Background
Otto Bettmann was born on October 15, 1903, in Leipzig, Germany, into the family of Hans and Charlotte (Frank) Bettmann. He came to the United States in 1935 and became a naturalized citizen in 1939.
Otto majored in history at the University of Leipzig and received a doctorate in philosophy in 1927.
graphic historian picture archivist author
Otto Bettmann was born on October 15, 1903, in Leipzig, Germany, into the family of Hans and Charlotte (Frank) Bettmann. He came to the United States in 1935 and became a naturalized citizen in 1939.
In 1921, Otto enrolled in the University of Leipzig and studied history, German literature, and philosophy. At that time a university education consisted of spending time at a number of schools. Otto went to Freiburg for two years then returned to Leipzig to complete his dissertation. His title, "The Emergence of Professional Ethics in the German Book Trade of the Eighteenth Century" addressed the issue of copyright legislation. Otto majored in history at the University of Leipzig and received a doctorate in philosophy in 1927.
Dr. Bettmann, who began collecting prints and photos as a boy and earned a doctorate at Leipzig University, was curator of rare books in the Prussian State Art Library in Berlin when Hitler came to power in 1933. He was dismissed for being Jewish. In 1935, when Jews could still emigrate but take little of value with them, he managed to get past Nazi customs with two trunks bulging with 25,000 images, many of them on film negatives he had made.
Working out of a small midtown office that was crammed with filing cabinets, Dr. Bettmann rented his images for one-time use, sometimes for $25, often for thousands of dollars, depending on the size of the audience. He was soon making a handsome living. In 1938, CBS asked him for something to illustrate fledgling radio for an advertisement. He came up with a 300-year-old line drawing by a Jesuit priest of a medieval castle with huge snail-shaped trumpets that transmitted sound from room to room. The ad won awards for CBS and gave the small archive a name.
With the coming of television, the demand for Bettmann graphics grew, and so did the archive. Dr. Bettmann searched out rare prints in libraries or acquired them through other collections. He often went off on excursions for materials, or wherever a tip led him. He began to employ picture researchers in Europe and America. The ''Bettmann Archive'' credit line became one of the most famous in the field of photojournalism.
During the Kennedy Presidency, he collected a huge file on rocking chairs. He kept a trove of Thomas Nast political cartoons for all the New York mayoral races. He had illustrations of George Washington's dentures and Sigmund Freud's couch. There were pictures of Depression mothers, sports figures, celebrities in art and music, images to suit almost any occasion. And one secret of his success was a remarkable filing system that made it possible to discover and retrieve items. Newspapers and magazines kept photo files by date and subject, but Dr. Bettmann cross-indexed his many ways - into 50 categories, 5,000 subjects from Aardvark to Zymosis, and many more thousands of subcategories, some whimsical (''Nice Try Dept.'').
Book publishers, advertising agencies and periodicals of all kinds went to Dr. Bettmann - often with 40 to 50 orders a day - to illustrate topics ranging from women's liberation and black nationalism to solar energy and views of the world from space. He was usually able to dig out something overnight. Dr. Bettmann, a small, pale man with white hair and a small Vandyke that gave him a something of the appearance of Freud in his later days, believed that the best pictures needed no captions. But while his career and livelihood focused on images, he was a man of letters and often deplored what he called the world's preoccupation with the visual media.
Dr. Bettmann over the years was the author or co-author of 14 books, many of them collaborations with noted writers. With Van Wyck Brooks, he produced ''Our Literary Heritage'' (Dutton, 1956), a pictorial condensation of a five-volume work by Mr. Brooks. His other co-authored works included ''A Pictorial History of Medicine'', (C. C. Thomas, 1956), ''A Pictorial History of American Sports'', (A. S. Barnes, 1952), and ''A Pictorial History of Music'' (Norton, 1960).
Dr. Bettmann's best-selling book was ''The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible'', (Random House, 1974), an iconoclastic pictorial view of America's nostalgia vogue; it portrayed the era between the Civil War and World War I as one of hard times, low salaries, rampant crime, bleak living conditions, bad food and crowded classrooms. It had 10 printings.
When sold to the Kraus-Thomson Organization in 1981, his archive consisted of five million photos, prints, woodcuts, posters, cartoons and other graphic material that chronicled the history of civilization, including many medical and technical drawings and images of personalities and events of the 20th century. In 1990, the archive acquired 11.5 million photographic images, most of them from the photo libraries of United Press International and Reuters. Many were cultural icons: Winston Churchill giving the victory sign, an astronaut on the moon, Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue, Marilyn Monroe standing over a subway grate as her skirt blew up.
William H. Gates, chairman of the Microsoft Corporation, bought the archive in 1995 through his Corbis Corporation as a step toward building a huge library of digitally stored images that may someday be sampled and sold on computer disks or over computer networks. The terms of the 1981 and 1995 transactions were not disclosed, but were believed to be multimillion-dollar deals.
After selling the Bettmann Archive, Dr. Bettmann moved to Boca Raton, where he continued to produce books. His last volume, ''Johann Sebastian Bach as His World Knew Him'', (Carrol Publishing Group, 1995), reflected a lifelong passion for Bach and music. His autobiography, ''Bettmann, the Picture Man'', was published by the University Press of Florida in 1992. The profits from another book, ''The Delights of Reading: Quotes, Notes and Anecdotes'' (David Godine, 1987) were donated to the Library of Congress. In recent years, Dr. Bettmann was the curator of rare books at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, where he also taught classes in history, graphic art and other subjects. Otto L. Bettmann died at Boca Raton Community Hospital in Florida of kidney failure. He was 94.
Quotations: ''I do not welcome the enormous emphasis on the picture. 'It is a flattening out of history. The picture can never describe what the word can. The word lassoes the thought. Pictures are very democratic, and they are remarkable in drawing a much larger audience than the word can. The picture makes the observer an immediate participant in the event, but the meaning in the event lies in the word.''
Physical Characteristics: Dr. Bettmann, a small, pale man with white hair and a small Vandyke that gave him a something of the appearance of Freud in his later days.
Bettmann married Anne Clemens, a Boston antiques dealer and interior decorator, in 1938. She died in 1987. He is survived by two sons, Wendell Gray, and Melvin Gray; a daughter, Beverly Schlesinger; four grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.