A New York house that treats a book the way a museum treats a fresco - as something worth five years and a 33-foot scaffold. It also makes toddler apps that hit No. 1. Both are true.
It is the middle of the night inside the Vatican. The tourists are gone. A 33-foot scaffold stands under the Sistine ceiling, and a team of photographers is working in the dark, frame by frame, capturing Michelangelo at a resolution the human eye standing on the floor will never get. Sixty-seven consecutive nights. More than 270,000 images. That is Callaway at work - and it tells you almost everything about how the company thinks.
Callaway Digital Arts - which operates today under the broader banner of Callaway Arts & Entertainment - designs, produces, and publishes museum-quality illustrated books, luxury limited editions, award-winning children's apps, and immersive cultural experiences. The company sits on Union Square in Manhattan, with a footprint that reaches East Hampton, Los Angeles, London, and Riyadh. Its founder, Nicholas Callaway, has spent more than 40 years at the edge of media and design, and he has never been especially interested in the middle of the market.
More than 40 years spent at the leading edge of contemporary media and design.- On Nicholas Callaway, founder & CEO
Here is the tension Callaway has built a company around. The image has never been more abundant - we carry millions of them in our pockets - and never more disposable. A Michelangelo fresco and a lunch photo arrive on the same glowing rectangle, scrolled past at the same speed. In a world where any picture is free, what makes one worth keeping?
Callaway's answer is contrarian: the most radical thing you can do with an image is slow it down and make it physical. Print it at near 1:1 scale. Bind it. Price it like the object it is. Most of publishing spent the 2010s chasing cheaper and faster. Callaway went the other direction, which is either very brave or very stubborn - in luxury publishing the two tend to look identical.
Nicholas Callaway did not arrive at publishing by accident. A Harvard graduate in Classics and Fine Arts, he became the first director of Galerie Zabriskie in Paris in the late 1970s, mounting photography shows of Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Man Ray - several seen in Europe for the first time. He learned early that an image is not just content. It is an event you can stage.
He carried that into book publishing, producing landmark titles - Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe's One Hundred Flowers, Irving Penn's Passage, Madonna's Sex, and OBAMA: The Historic Journey with The New York Times. Then, in 2010, he did the thing few luxury craftsmen do: he bet on software. With a $6 million Series A from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, he founded Callaway Digital Arts to make children's apps for the brand-new iPad.
The image is not content. It is an event you can stage - whether on a museum wall, a printed page, or a glowing screen.- The throughline of Callaway's four decades
It was an unusual pairing. A man who would later spend five years on a Vatican book also sat down to figure out how a two-year-old taps a glowing alphabet. The bet was that craft scales across formats - that the discipline behind a fine art book is the same discipline that makes a great app. The App Store charts suggest he was onto something.
Callaway directs landmark photography exhibitions - Adams, Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray - many shown in Europe for the first time.
The publishing division launches, beginning a run of 150+ art, photography, design, and children's titles.
Callaway produces one of the most talked-about illustrated books of the decade.
David Kirk's picture book becomes a phenomenon - ~5 million copies, 70+ titles, and a Nick Jr. series.
Kleiner Perkins backs a pivot into children's apps for Apple's new iPad and iPhone.
Miss Spider, Sesame Street's The Monster at the End of This Book, Thomas & Friends, and Endless Alphabet top their App Store categories.
Publishes the 608-page Mixing Up the Medicine with the Bob Dylan Center; signs a distribution deal with Hachette Book Group.
A five-year collaboration with the Vatican Museums yields a three-volume luxury edition - 600 copies, $35,000 each.
Callaway's output looks scattered until you notice the common thread: every product is an attempt to make an image impossible to scroll past.
Three volumes, near 1:1 scale, shot in gigapixel with the Vatican Museums and Scripta Maneant. 600 copies, $35,000.
608 pages, 1,100+ images, 30 original essays, seven years in the making with the Bob Dylan Center.
The companion book to Peter Jackson's documentary - the archive, bound.
Children's apps - Miss Spider, Thomas & Friends, Sesame Street - several No. 1 in their App Store category.
Family entertainment, branded products, and immersive installations built around its publishing properties.
An art book you can hold at the scale of the original is not a reproduction. It is the closest most people will ever get.- The logic of the "museum without walls"
Ambition is cheap; scaffolding is not. The case for Callaway is in the figures - both the patient ones (years per project) and the loud ones (millions of copies). Here is the scale of a few signature efforts.
There is also the venture-capital proof point. In 2010, Kleiner Perkins - a firm that backed Google and Amazon - put $6 million into a Series A for a children's app studio run by a fine-art book publisher. The apps that followed reached No. 1 in their categories. Distribution partner Hachette Book Group signed on for the trade list in 2023. Museums and estates - the Vatican, the Bob Dylan Center - keep saying yes to multi-year collaborations.
A firm that backed Google wrote a $6M check for a children's app studio run by an art-book publisher. Then the apps hit No. 1.- Series A, Kleiner Perkins, 2010
Strip away the formats and Callaway is doing one thing: documenting and preserving art, culture, and history at the highest fidelity available, then putting it in your hands. Call it a museum without walls. The Vatican ceiling, a Nobel laureate's archive, a child's first alphabet - all of it gets the same treatment, which is to say the obsessive one.
The company pairs fine craftsmanship with state-of-the-art imaging - gigapixel photography, archival digital technology, museum-grade color - and partners closely with the institutions that own the originals. It is a business model that only works if people still believe an image is worth slowing down for. Callaway is betting they do.
Preservation is not nostalgia. It is the decision that some things deserve to outlast the scroll.- The thesis underneath the catalog
Return to that scaffold under the Sistine ceiling, in the dark, on night fifty of sixty-seven. It is an absurd amount of effort to make pictures of something already photographed a million times. But that is the point. Anyone can take the millionth photo. Callaway is trying to make the one you would put on a shelf and keep.
The road has not been smooth - in early 2026, Callaway Arts & Entertainment filed for Chapter 11 protection in New York, the kind of turbulence that follows almost any business built on big, expensive bets. What endures is the idea: that in an age of infinite cheap images, the rare and well-made one still matters. The ceiling has been photographed before. It had never been held quite like this. That difference - the difference between seeing something and keeping it - is the whole company.