Discovering Artists Books

Discovering Artists Books
The art, the artist and the issues

Above: Mallarme, Un Coup de des, 1897
Below: Filippo Marinetti, Les mots en liberte ( The Words to freedom), 1919

... The resulting plate would be etched in extremely shallow relief, making both sides of the plate usable, for economy."¹⁴ The plate was then inked and printed on a rolling press. After printing the images were sensitively hand-colored with watercolors by Blake and his wife, Catherine Sophia Boucher.
In this way Blake's work resembles the illuminated manuscripts of the 7th and 8th centuries, with each page being colored individually to make a one-of-a-kind work of art.
Another poet that is is frequently referred to as being an influence or inspiration for 20th and 21st century book artists is the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898). In his work he was searching for "a book in which typography and even the foldings of the pages achieve an ideational, analytical, and expressive significance."¹⁵ He saw the book as an expansion of the letter where each phrase had a relationship with the page and proportion of the book. Paul Valéry, one of Mallarmé's colleagues describes his work in this way.

Mallarmé finally showed me how the words were arranged on the page. It seemed to me that I was looking at the form and pattern of a thought, placed for the first time in finite space. Here space itself truly spoke, dreamed, and gave birth to temporal forms. Expectancy, doubt, concentration all were visible things.¹⁶

In Un Coup de dés (A Throw of the Dice) first published in 1897, one can see how placement and typography inspire the text, expanding and clarifying its meaning. By varying the type size, boldness of face and arrangement of the text, Mallarmé encourages the reader to invent his or her own order of reading.¹⁷ This idea was later adopted by Futurist Filippo Marinetti in his 1912 manifesto Parole in Liberta (Words at Liberty). In an interview in Artists/Author: Contemporary Artists' Books,Martha Wilson likens this period in the beginning of the 20th century to the 1960s, where artists were seeking new means to get attention. The Futurists were using print to broadcasting their ideas, and in the 1960s artists found cheaply produced, easily distributed books a good medium to disseminate their ideas.

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A brief history of the artists book