If you are anything like me, books are dog-eared fetishes. Small-ticket indulgences that satisfy the literary fix—at once an object to be adored and a means of escape. Turn that Vintage Contemporary cover and you are in a different world.

Artist books—and we don’t mean that Picasso coffee-table tome you lugged home from Paris—take the book in a different direction. Offset-printed, Xeroxed, hand-stitched, even smeared with mud, artist books are tactile and, long before the digital diary, interactive. Above all, they resist definition. “Even people who have been doing it for years have different ideas of what [an artist book] is,” says Margaret Kessler of the San Francisco Center for the Book. Her own definition? “There is a sense of sequence. It’s like unpacking. The art work unfolds. An artist book is like a film, if you want a metaphor for it. Most books are done at a scale that allows that they are an experience. Some can even be room-size.”

Kessler takes long pauses between thoughts. She wants to get it right. “Something that is unique to the artist book is that it is frequently closed,” she says finally. “What is inside is hidden. Pages beg to be turned.”

HEAVY METALS
From the earliest book artists (cave painters? tablet engravers?), the practice has been driven by an urge to view the book as a thing in itself, and not just the keeper of a story. Prior to the Renaissance, secular artist books were rare. The Catholic Church was the foremost patron of the arts, and it commissioned richly illustrated texts—like the Book of Kells (1)—that linked the word of God to humankind. Sacred texts and illuminated manuscripts are part of the book arts tradition, but their precious one-off qualities (think tonsured monks inscribing parchment with a trembling hand) did not survive the invention of moveable type. 

Johannes Gutenberg’s famous press, which arrived in the 15th century, did much to spread the gospel. But it was of limited use to 18th century English poet William Blake. Considered something of a crackpot by the publishers of his day, Blake transferred his skill as a tombstone engraver to copper printing plates. Edging his printing plates with wax to form a shallow basin into which he poured an acid mixture of vinegar, salamoniac, Bay salt, and verdigris, Blake produced lavish cosmological screeds such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (2). His plates required no lettersetting, which meant he could control the creative process himself. For Blake, how the book was made and its contents were of a piece. 

POSTINDUSTRIAL 
Like Blake, 19th century artists  were spurred by limitations in  printing technology. They viewed machine typesetting as a chilly byproduct of industrialization—one that was leeching the craft from book arts. In response, Eduard Manet and William Morris produced livres d’artiste, fine illustrated books printed in limited editions. A turn-of-the-century afternoon would find Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in the Parc De Monceau, on break from his day job illustrating Moulin Rouge posters, sketching animals to accompany Jules Renard’s 1899 Histoires Naturelles. (3) 

By the early 20th century, Cubists and Dadaist were looking up from their absinthe-stained copies of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and taking in what was around them. Instead of gauzy impressionist landscapes they saw noisy streetcars, advertising placards, and windblown copies of Le Monde littering the street. Artists in Paris and Berlin embraced the randomness and the soot, printing pamphlets and broadsides to disseminate their own brand of urban noise. 

In the ’40s, quintessential Dadaist Marcel Duchamp struck up a correspondence with Joseph Cornell that led to the creation of the Boîte-en-Valis—a deluxe-edition minimuseum of Duchamp’s work in a book-in-box format—and Cornell’s Duchamp Dossier, which combined readymades, dry-cleaning receipts, and postcards. Book artist Chad Johnson explains the shift between the livres d’artiste and the sculptural books that came after them: “Duchamp’s works are more of a concept and a system. There are relationships between things.” 

POP PULP
In the 1960s Pop and Fluxus artists were drawn to the relationships between the new and improved, high-concentrate brand of postwar consumerism and art. Fluxus artist Al Hansen made art out of trash—everything from cigarette butts to Hershey’s chocolate-bar wrappers. He performed his alchemy at happenings throughout the ’60s and ’70s, and later was joined by his grandson, Beck, for another romp through the landfill. The 1998 exhibition catalog Playing with Matches presented collages of found objects, pages torn from magazines, and product labels bundled together in book form. (5) 

Turning to the trash of the sky, Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha was drawn to the bold lettering of advertising slogans and billboards. He made heroic portraits of Standard Oil stations and the Hollywood sign. But paintings and prints seemed too precious for such mass-consumable icons, so in 1963 Ruscha turned to books. He viewed the paperback as the perfect medium for his wry takes on product culture. Ruscha worked directly with a printer on Twentysix Gasoline Stations, which, as the title suggests, displays Ruscha’s photographs of filling stations along Route 40 from Los Angeles to Oklahoma. (6) Wrote British curator-critic Clive Phillpot, “Here was a book—primarily visual, comprising nondescript photos of gas stations, assembled by a visual artist, printed carefully but not slickly, and susceptible to reprinting—that could slip into any bookstore, or pocket, and be marketed like any other paperback.” Ruscha reinvented the artist book as a mass-consumable object. 

LINER NOTES 
Ruscha’s commercialization of the artist book takes us right up to hybrid art and literary review McSweeney’s. With its matte, almost archival quality, McSweeney’s belongs squarely in the tradition of the artist book. If Ruscha’s photo book is distinctive for its use of images where you’d expect text, then McSweeney’s is its opposite, using lists, marginalia, and miniature text as art. “I always saw the design of the book as part of the book itself,” says McSweeney’s editor Dave Eggers, who was trained as a painter. “That’s why in Issue 4 we let the authors do their own covers, and why we try to reinvent the form of the magazine with each issue. There are just so many things you can do.”

Eggers, best-selling author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, certainly has access to big-name publishing houses. But he chooses to publish McSweeney’s himself, working closely with a small press in Iceland to push the journal in new directions. “The first time I visited our printer, I was just amazed at how many ways you could make a book,” he explains. “And it doesn’t cost much to experiment. So we play around with materials and design.” Recent issues of the quarterly have featured multiple dust jackets, pamphlets housed in cardboard boxes, and industrial rubber bands. (7) “There’s a reason people buy books and why e-books haven’t overtaken the market like some thought would happen,” Eggers says. “People love the feel of a book. We indulge that and make the books feel as good as possible.” 

ELECTRONICA 
Just as video killed the radio star, some thought the migration to digital content streams would signal the death of the book. But young book artists are taking advantage of the Web as yet another medium—one that makes self-publishing a point-and-click affair. 

“Digital books read like books. They almost develop like an accordion-fold book, where you are constantly discovering layers and pages,” says Kessler. Johnson elaborates: “What makes a book is that it is a system. You can’t understand the whole book from a part of the book. Everything is dependent on something else. So it’s a system that can exist in a digital state, ordered or not.” 

The most common digital artist books are online diaries, or weblogs, which have spawned a raft of exquisite corpse–style projects. One, www.1000Journals.com, used the Web to create an internationally coauthored set of art books; 1,000 blank journals were sent out into the world to be filled by everyone with whom they made contact. Handed from person to person, each journal is posted online when its pages are filled. Another project, www.20things.org, the brainchild of Judith Zissman, swaps 20 sets of 20 objects made by 20 people in 20 days. While not limited to artist books, many of the submissions are handmade volumes, and Zissman refers to each collection as an edition. “Many of the people who participate work digitally in programming and on Web stuff,” she says. “20things gives them a chance to make a physical object.” (8) Established authors are also using the Web to experiment with book projects that would fly under the radar of the publishing industry. Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X and Shampoo Planet, collaged together a tour diary from scribbled notes and used boarding passes. Scanned at actual size, the pages at www.coupland.com have a feeling of immediacy as they load one by one on the screen. The piece is a journey, a road trip, a sequence, and, ultimately, a book. 

Virtual book projects build on the values of ’60s and ’70s artists, who published, in part, to democratize art ownership. Taken as a whole, book arts encourage the paper-cut, toner-stained, self-publishing mentality. So what is an artist book? Go define it. 

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell image courtesy William Blake Archive