Skip to Main Content

Literature and Language Guide

Book Arts

Book Art "is the field of art that involves the creation of works that use or refer to structural and conceptual properties of books. The term also is used to describe works of art produced in this field. These works may contain text and/or images or maybe sculptural. Book art has existed for thousands of years and can be seen in Egyptian papyri, Chinese, Japanese and Korean scrolls and books, Mesoamerican codices, and in one form or another, throughout all of human history. In an interview with Cathy Courtney's book Speaking of Book Art, book artist Helen Douglas discusses her knowledge of livres d' artiste and twentieth-century Russian books as examples of book art from previous generations. [1] Later in the interview, Douglas continues to write about the genre of Book Art stating that "...you can talk about a "painting" and "sculpture" you should be able to talk about "book"." The term "Book Arts" refers to the creative and craft disciplines used to produce book art, such as printing, printmaking, papermaking, typography, and bookbinding. As a field of contemporary art, Book Art has seen explosive growth since the 1960s"(Wikipedia, 2019). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_Art 

  • Book Arts Web The best starting point for all things related to Book Arts
  • Tutorial and Reference Links @ the Book Arts Web
  • Definition of the Artist's Book sub-titled: BSO's (Book Shaped Objects); Art vs. Craft
  • The Whatness of Bookness, or What is a Book @the Book Arts Web; one of the most famous definitions of the term book
  • SHARP: Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing does for the history of reading and publishing what Book Arts Web does for the production of books
  • Emigre Choice Highly Recommended site: Emigre was among the first digital type foundries; this is a commercial site and as such it displays its products and provides the online means of purchasing them with an absolutely straightforward clarity and simplicity of approach that is commendable. But it also happens that the "products" displayed on this site are the work of artists, and primarily the works of the husband-and-wife team Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko, who together have been an important and occasionally controversial force in computer-generated type design since its beginnings in the 1980s, and, through their self-published magazine Émigré 

Go to the Library Collection