The Quiet Revolution of Artists' Books at Your Library

Walk past the reference desk at most public libraries and you'll find them tucked on a shelf somewhere between fine art and literature: artists' books. Not books about art. Books that are art.

I picked up one last week at my local branch. The covers were thick boards wrapped in marbled paper. Inside, each page held a single word paired with a photograph of hands in different positions. The artist had sewn the binding herself. You could see the needle holes, the slight wobble in the thread line. The book weighed as much as a brick.

Artists' books occupy strange territory. Ed Ruscha started making them in the 1960s, printing photographs of gas stations and parking lots in cheap paperback editions. He wanted art you could mail, art that cost less than a museum ticket. Other artists went the opposite direction, creating one-of-a-kind objects with pop-up mechanisms, embedded objects, pages that fold out into maps.

What makes these objects matter now? We read everything on screens. Books have become nostalgic objects, tokens of a slower time. Artists' books take that nostalgia and crack it open. They remind you that books have physical properties: weight, texture, the resistance of a page that doesn't want to turn.

Julie Chen makes books with moving parts. Pull a tab and text appears in a window. Fold a page and the image changes. Her book "Panorama" requires you to stand up and unfold it across a table. You can't read it sitting down.

Libraries collect these works because they belong to everyone, not just collectors with deep pockets. The Smithsonian Libraries hold thousands. The Museum of Modern Art has an entire collection you can request to view. Your town library might have a dozen, filed under "special collections" or shelved with the oversized art books.

I've watched people discover them by accident. They pick up what looks like a regular book and find pages made of vellum, or photographs printed on fabric, or text that spirals across the page in the artist's handwriting. They slow down. They turn pages carefully. They remember that reading can be a physical act.

The best artists' books don't explain themselves. They ask you to figure out how they work. Some open from the top instead of the side. Some have no words at all. Some you have to take apart to understand.

Next time you visit the library, ask if they have any. The librarian might pull out a box from a locked cabinet. You might have to sign your name to look at them. That's part of the point. These books require attention. They reward it too.