In Search of the Book as a Work of Art

In Search of the Book as a Work of Art asks questions about how we understand the words 'art' and 'book' and what happens when we put them together. It argues that the categories by which we have distinguished different kinds of books no longer tell us what we are looking at when we look at new books, including many made by trade publishers. Categories like 'fine press book' and 'artist book' have served useful purposes in the past, but are now redundant in the face of the incredible range of categorical overlaps in books that people are actually making. Along the way, this book explores and explodes a number of current ideas about books whose use-by dates are seen by the author as well and truly passed. This work supplements the author's earlier essays, The Books to Come (Cuneiform 2012) and The Printing of a Masterpiece (Black Pepper 2008), with a summation of four decades as a poet, printer, commentator, and publisher in the field. Taking his cue from a long-felt need for 'the book' to be a serious conversation outside of specialist discourse, the author presents an account in plain language about art and about the book that implies no expert knowledge - no technical terms, no specialised concepts, and no need to have the artist or their curators on hand to tell us what we are seeing when we see or pick up any new book. If this book is a critique, it is not a critique of any book made by anyone under the banner of the old categories (private press book, fine press book, artist book, limited edition book, and so on) but it is an examination of the words we use to talk about these books. It wants to know how the non-expert already talks about books and to see if a greater sensitivity to that ordinary language, 'the language of the tribe', is what we need instead of an increase in the complexity of the language with which we talk to each other about books - a turn to the books themselves.