The Century of Artists' Books is the first full-length study of the development of artists' books as a twentieth century art-form. This work situates artists' books within the context of mainstream developments in the visual arts from Russian Futurism and Surrealism to Fluxus, Conceptual Art, to Postmodernism. Designed to raise critical and theoretical issues as well as provide a historical overview, this book explores more than two hundred individual books in relation to their structure, form, and conceptualization. Topics include the discussion of the poetics of the book, the book as a metaphor, the conceptual space of the book, and books as narrative and non-narrative sequences. Each chapter uses these specific issues to examine the works of well-known book artists and publishers. The book provides a foundation for future work in the history and critical interpretation of artists' books, as well as offering a structure for teaching artists' books to practitioners, collectors, and curators.

Reconsiders the tradition of modern art and its history and draws upon the established critical lineage of modern art, well known figures and frequently referred to texts.

Calling attention to the visual materiality of the text, this book attempts to halt linear reading, trapping the eye in a field of letters which make a complex object on the page. The writing refers continually to the visceral character of language, literalizing metaphors of tongue, breath, and flesh. The work both embodies and discusses language as a physical form, one whose properties cannot be ignored by arriving at a disembodied content. The format of this work invokes a reference to the carmina figurata of the Renaissance -- works in which a sacred image was picked out in red letters against a field of black type so that a holy figure could be seen and meditated on in the process of reading. The technique is reversed here, with the red field of small type serving as a background in which large, black letters are arranged like figures on the red ground. This is a facsimile reprint of an original letterpress edition issued in 1989.