Writing and painting are both human art forms. Both are forms of expressions and convey thoughts, messages and meanings. I guess painting figurines or animals shapes on cave walls began before writing of alphabets, words, tablets or books.
Has anyone conducted a study to decipher if one art form was more predominant than the other. If you take single book titles (not total published copies) and single paintings from a time when it all began, is there a consensus that one of them, painting or writing has more in numbers than another.
The problem is that the world is full of books and paintings. Question is, which is more.
Define paintings. Because every family refrigerator is covered with things that I’d call paintings.
Most people will produce dozens of paintings in their childhood. How many books do most people write?
Heck, my wife and her friends went to a wine and painting night, I ended up with 9 versions of aspen trees in the fall that took a year to convince my wife to throw out. Based on the output of drunks and children I would assume there are thousands more paintings than novels.
If you are talking about professionals then I would guess the numbers are closer but the average artist puts out more paintings than the average novelist. Even some of the pulp ebook guys right now only put out 4-6 novels per year and at least the painters I know are closer to two per month.
For that matter, define books. Diaries, pamphlets, manuals, handbooks, even magazines?
The OP refers to book titles, rather than individual copies of a printed (digitized?) book.
Which made me wonder about a side note: when did books start having ‘titles’?
When ‘books’ were on papyrus or vellum scrolls, were they given titles? Or is that something that was added to them later? Looking at the Magna Carta, for example, I don’t se any kind of a title or heading, it just seems to jump into the subject. (And what a wall of text!) Nor do I see much of a title given on the tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The OP refers to book titles, rather than individual copies of a printed (digitized?) book.
Which made me wonder about a side note: when did books start having ‘titles’?
When ‘books’ were on papyrus or vellum scrolls, were they given titles? Or is that something that was added to them later?
Looking at the Magna Carta, for example, I don’t see any kind of a title or heading, it just seems to jump into the subject. (And what a wall of text!) Nor do I see much of a title given on the tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
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Colibri
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I personally know a lot more painters than book authors (and I know plenty of both). An author might reasonably produce two manuscripts in a decade. A painter typically cranks out six or seven canvases in a year. I’m gonna go with paintings.
Way more paintings. Artists just cannot stop themselves. For every successful piece of art in a gallery there are hundreds or even thousands that were not chosen to put on the wall.
There are a lot of books and a lot of unfinished drafts, but they would pale in comparison. It takes a year or more to write one book, whereas some artists can create one complete painting per day.