This is an in-depth survey of photobooks by world-acclaimed Magnum photographers, featuring some of the rarest books ever to have been published, as well as many landmark and iconic books. The first ever illustrated bibliography of over 1,300 photobooks published by Magnum photographers since the agency was founded in 1947, this volume offers rich insight into both the history of the photobook and the important role that Magnum has played in documentary photography. The seventy-year arc of Magnum Photos describes a vibrant and perilously fragile trajectory since its founding two years after the end of World War II. Its first members--Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, David "Chim" Seymour and George Rodger--had begun their photographic careers during the previous two decades, supported by the introduction of the portable small- and medium-format cameras combined with the more light-sensitive films that gave photographers enormous mobility and flexibility in engaging with their subjects, as well as the mass-circulation picture magazines such as Vu, Regards, Life, Look, and Picture Post, which provided an effective means of widespread distribution. These early innovations not only permitted the up-close, intimate coverage of war as it unfolded--an endeavour in which Magnum's founders excelled during both the Spanish Civil War and World War II--but would also allow conflict and its victims to be turned into a spectacle, a trend against which succeeding generations of Magnum photographers have rebelled. The photobook soon emerged as a counterbalance to the mass media, since it not only allowed photographers to report more extensively on a particular subject, but also enabled them to articulate nuanced, developed, at times dissonant points of view. This trend accelerated as photographers took on greater responsibility for the design, layout, picture selection and text of their own books, becoming fully fledged authors rather than simply providing images for others to present.--Adapted from cover and introduction.