Books About Books

Books are a meeting place. A sum of their many parts and artistic approaches. Form, concept, material and craft are bound together to create something rooted in its functionality, a process that often crosses over into the messier realm of art. Books. Art, Craft...

For more than 35 years, Coracle has produced artists' books, critical works, editions and ephemera. Printed in Norfolk tells the story of this contemporary small press in all its manifestations as printer, publisher, bookshop and gallery. The emphasis here is on the years 1989-2012, when,...

Author John Hill is the founder of the hugely influential architecture blog A Daily Dose of Architecture, which shifted course to focus entirely on architecture books of all kinds. His selection for this volume spans centuries, continents, and genres to include Le Corbusier's Towards...

This authoritative and magnificently illustrated book on herbals describes rare books, manuscripts, and other works of art conserved at the Oak Spring Garden Library, Upperville, Virginia, a collection formed over many years by Rachel Lambert Mellon. The author has selected sixty-three works from the Library's extensive collections. The volume...

This is the first comprehensive overview about a talented 20th-century writer, photographer, and “builder” of books who greatly impacted architecture appreciation in America and beyond. George Everard Kidder Smith (1913–1997) produced a remarkable corpus of beautifully illustrated books, primarily about modern buildings and sites. His...

William Harry Rogers was one of the finest artist-designers of the Victorian period in Britain, to be considered in the same company as Pugin, William Burges, Owen Jones and Christopher Dresser. His designs won several prize medals at the Great Exhibition of 1851, the event which provides a...

Few have heard of the Shakespeare Head Press, although it ranks alongside William Morris’s Kelmscott, Emery Walker and Cobden-Sanderson’s Doves, Eric Gill’s Golden Cockerel and St John Hornby’s Ashendene. Its origins date to the 1860s, when a young Arthur Henry Bullen, dreamt of printing...

At the heart of this volume are close analyses of two of the most significant and experimental futurist books: Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards) and Vzorval' (Explodity). Painters and poets-including Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Mayakovsky-collaborated to fabricate hand-lithographed books, for which...

A richly illustrated look at some of the most important photobooks of the 20th century.France experienced a golden age of photobook production from the late 1920s through the 1950s. Avant-garde experiments in photography, text, design, and printing, within the context of a growing modernist...

The great painter Henri Matisse was also a great book illustrator. A pioneering member of the Fauves, a supreme colourist, a remarkable draftsman, and a creative genius, this is the Matisse known and admired by everyone with even a passing interest in modern art....

Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1953) was a central figure in the Russian Constructivist art movement; a radical activist, a pioneer of photomontage, a theorist, and a teacher. This concise, comprehensive and informative work focuses largely on Rodchenko's graphic work in the form of book jackets, posters and...

Coracle has been producing books and other printed artefacts displaced from the page, often leading to installations for walls and other settings. A Table of Books in Ballybeg gathers most of the Irish projects produced by Coracle, working from the townland of Grange, west...

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) was a Russian pioneer of abstract painting whose work has influenced generations of artists. His Sounds (Klänge) of 1912 is one of the earliest, most beautiful examples of a 20th-century artist’s book. These “sound poems” are alternately narrative and expressive, witty and simple...

Rare & Collectible This exquisite artist's-book-as-exhibition-catalogue was produced to accompany rising Los Angeles conceptualist Brandon Lattu's first European survey, at Kunstverein Bielefeld, Germany. Rather than show standard thematic groups of work, Lattu here presents individual images of books from his library - to scale,...

Rare & Collectible A la plaza con Fidel (To the plaza with Fidel) is doubly rare among Cuban photobooks - relatively few photobooks were produced in Cuba after the Revolution, and A la plaza con Fidel is also notable for its unique subject matter. Photographed between...

An inspirational and practical book on how to interpret and collaborate on different themes in textile art. With foreword by Marie-Therese Wisniowski, who runs Art Quill Studio. The trend for collaborative textile art is increasing in popularity. This fascinating guide provides a rich seam of...

Wyndham Payne's career as an illustrator began in the early 1920s illustrating books, calendars, greetings cards and advertisements, often with toys - soldiers, model theatres, trains - as a subject. Payne's designs included a celebrated jacket for The Wind in the Willows produced for the publisher...

Ivan Brunetti is a cartoon and comics scholar based in Chicago. This eye-popping illustrated autobiography traces his artistic trajectory and output, from youthful doodles to his cover illustrations and comic strips. Noted for combining blackly humorous, taboo-laden subject matter with simplified and exaggerated cartoon drawing...

Romeyn de Hooghe was the most inventive and prolific etcher of the later Dutch Golden Age. The producer of wide-ranging book illustrations, newsprints, allegories, and satire, he is best known as the chief propaganda artist working for stadtholder and king William III. This study,...

In 1972 Leo and Philippa Bernard bought Chelsea Rare Books, a small antiquarian bookshop in the King’s Road, Chelsea, advertised for sale in The Times. The Bernards had no previous experience of bookselling, but Chelsea in the 1970s was a lively place. The stock...