Southampton Artist Expands Popular Steampunk Book

Art Donovan, the Southampton artist who curated the first museum exhibition of steampunk design, has revisited his authoritative book on the art movement, featuring more artists and works in other media.

Steampunk is a fiction and art genre inspired by the Victorian era and the industrialized 19th century that re-images history with advanced inventions that are in keeping with the time period's aesthetic.

Donovan's "The Art of Steampunk: Extraordinary Devices and Ingenious Contraptions from the Leading Artists of the Steampunk Movement," was first published in 2011. "The interesting thing about the first book was that it was a journal for the exhibition I curated at the Museum of the History of Science at the University of Oxford," Donovan said Monday.

A digital copy of his journal was sold at the museum on CD in conjunction with the exhibition before it was turned into a book. "I didn't plan on being an author or even doing a book about it," he said. But Fox Chapel Publishing reached out to him after learning of the exhibition on the Internet, where it was highly publicized.

The first edition spent 13 weeks as number 1 on Amazon in the pop art book category. "They went into six printings on it," Donovan said.

"I got the best artists working in the genre, but there was some real restrictions from the museum," Donovan said, explaining that everything in the exhibition had to reflect actual devices in the museum's collection.  "I was not able to include any fashion. I could not include any two-dimensional art."

The new edition includes the latest works from some of the original artists, better photographs of works that were included in the first edition, plus works from artists who design steampunk clothing and digital art.

Donovan said the small coffee table book is image rich and has become a collector's item among fans of the movement.