Everyone knows what a book is. They’re normally bound chunks of white pages filled with black text. Text size can vary, as can the number of pages or the size of the book. They can be academic or for pleasure or somewhere in between, and we’ve all picked one up sometime or another (by choice or by the forced hand of academia).

But what if I told you this is a book?

Or this?

Artists’ books: works of art that utilize the form of a book; artists’ books: books that utilize the imagination of artwork. I say that loosely– these pieces of art challenge the very definition of book. They’re often made in a limited edition, or are one-of-a-kind and totally unique in the world.

The history of artists’ books stems all the way back to the late 1700s with William Blake. Most famously, Blake took the publication of Songs of Innocence and Experience entirely into his own hands: along with his wife Catherine, he wrote, illustrated, colored, printed, and bound everything in the book. The artwork was included by means of relief etching, a process of drawing and writing on copper plates, then etching the plates in acid to leave the design remaining. The artwork often intermingled with the text, providing deeper meaning to his poems, as shown here:

Blake’s key processes of self-publication and coupling art with text is exactly what artists do today with artist’s books, except the book doesn’t simply contain the art–the book is the art. Book artists have pushed the limits since Blake’s time and take their lead from another poet, the 19th century Frenchman Stéphane Mallarmé, who envisioned the ideal form and structure of the book before writing any text, and who used white space as composition for multi-layered meaning. Today the artists’ book has strayed further from what we would recognize and classify as the traditional bound codex whose physical form is a text block sewn into a case; they come in all shapes, sizes, and conceptions.

The one below is in recognizable book form, but challenges conventional information organization by utilizing the names of the parts of the book as the text the book contains. The self-aware “Appendix” page breaks down the custom of the appendix and comments on its form simultaneously. The text says “the appendix should not be a repository / for odds and ends of the author’s research / that he/she was unable to work into the text.”

For me, artist’s books make me stop and reconsider everything that I had previously accepted about books. Who’s to say having a book within a shell is wrong?

By breaking from the norm, artists ask viewers to reconsider why these norms exist at all, and they manage to further add meaning to a bibliographic work by imbuing a layer of emotion to the text through its form. Of course, I don’t necessarily see myself turning to an artist’s book the next time I’m tasked with a lengthy research paper about a historical event. But that’s not their purpose; to me, because they convey their message (in an albeit nontraditional way), they’ve still succeeded in making meaning of the human experience.

If I’ve piqued your interest, you can browse Santa Clara’s artists’ books in the library’s catalog under the subject heading Artists’ books — Specimens. Or, you can stop by to browse in person.

Header image: my favorite artist’s book in our collection, Evolve = Unroll by Sara Press. Yes, that’s a snake egg made with the scroll of text inside. It’s fascinating.