Scope and Contents Marvin Sackner reviewed the book and wrote a blurb for the dust jacket. Betty Bright is a co-founder and curator of the Minneapolis Center for Book Arts who was responsible for over 50 exhibitions in a nine year-period. She has written a book on artist books that removes the chaos from the many flavors of this genre. Her analysis is confined almost exclusively to British and American writers and artists. She discusses artist books chronologically based upon the classification of the fine press book, deluxe book, bookwork, sculptural books and hybrids She begins the journey with the books by William Morris of the English Arts and Crafts movement in the late nineteenth century. She mentions that Morris was preoccupied with the design of the book because he believed that such books should not only tell a story but cause the reader to enter into a new world, a remark that seems apropos to the artist book today. Along the way, she cites exhibitions and catalogues, some well known and...

Scope and Contents The Foreword was written by Renee Reise Hubert & Judd D. Hubert. Amazon.com commented: "This important history of the artist's book, a flourishing form which over the years has often been greeted with confusion by critics, collectors, historians, and artists, aims to spell out its role in contemporary art and to claim for it a vital and heretofore unacknowledged status since the blossoming of the artform in the 70s. Renowned scholar and curator Betty Bright takes an inclusive view of the varied field in order to redress its marginalization, identifying three distinct types: the fine press book, the deluxe book, and the bookwork. She covers crucial supporters of the form, like New York's Center for Book Arts, Franklin Furnace, and the Visual Studies Workshop Press in Rochester, New York, as well as key organizations and figures in Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Bright examines how artist's books have responded to specific movements, such as Pop, Fluxus, and...