Category Archives: Artists’ books

This is the first in a series of posts about artists’ books in our collection. Since most of our artists’ books are kept behind the desk, we hope that these posts will help you to begin your own exploration of the collection.

The Nameless Dead, by Clifton Meador (PABA Publishing, 2004)

If you’re familiar with artists’ books as handmade examples of bookbinding craft or innovative, unusual structures, you may look at The Nameless Dead and wonder “Why on earth is this an artist’s book?” It looks like any hardcover you would pick up at your local bookstore. Open it up and start to read, though, and it quickly becomes obvious that this is no ordinary book.

The book-within-a-book featured in The Nameless Dead.

Some artists’ books are like lyric poems, others are more like one-liners. Clifton Meador‘s book is a novel, packed with detail, plot, and multiple levels of narrative. A conventional novel would do those things solely with text, but Meador uses all of the tools of the page to tell the story. Text shares space with photographs, diagrams, even an entire book-within-the-book that Meador inserted to add an extra layer to the fiction.

Through his arrangement of all the elements on the page, he guides you through the story’s multiple levels and controls the pace of your reading. The first pages of the book are a good example:

The opening pages of The Nameless Dead.

The first spread has no text at all — just a photo of a roadside scene. The empty white space of the sky gives the impression of expansive desert. The blurriness of the photo gives the impression of speed.

The book’s first words appear on the next spread of pages:

The second spread of pages.

Above a similar roadside landscape are the words “Let’s say you just woke up in a car, a car going too fast on a narrow winding road.” The shortness of the text and its placement on the righthand side of the page help to continue the feeling of speed.

The subtle touch, though, is the way he splits that first sentence into two lines and italicizes the second line. There’s no textual or grammatical reason to do it, but there is an artistic one. It prepares the reader to expect two voices. That becomes very important as the book goes on and the layers of the story multiply.

On the surface the story is about traveling to a ruined city in the desert, but it becomes obvious that all is not as it seems. Midway through the book, while exploring this ruined city the narrator asks, “Am I dead?” Suddenly we must re-think the whole story up to that point.

Things get a little weird later in The Nameless Dead.

Part travel narrative, part meditation on the afterlife, part postmodern novel — and we haven’t even begun to look at the visuals or the exquisite offset printing! I can’t adequately describe The Nameless Dead in this small space. You’ll just have to come curl up with it and read for yourself.

– Josh Hockensmith

"Memory Loss," by Scott McCarney, is one of more than 600 artists' books in the Sloane Art Library collection.

Every day we read new articles about the death of the book, the decline of print culture, the inevitable e-mergence of e-verything digital. At the same time we see frequent revelations of artists doing amazing new things with the book form. While the traditional book may be on the decline as the main vehicle for our information, more people than ever feel a special appreciation for what books can do.

That means that it’s a great time to be an artist’s book.

"Words of Chan K'in: Lacandon Jungle" is an artist's book produced by Taller Leñateros, a collective of Mayan women in Chiapas, Mexico.

At the Sloane Art Library we have over 600 artists’ books. They range from the early photographic bookworks of Ed Ruscha to the contemporary, almost architectural marvels of Julie Chen. We’re also lucky to receive many Latin American artists’ books through discoveries made by Teresa Chapa – UNC’s Librarian for Latin America, Iberia, Latina/o Studies.

A wide variety of patrons make use of our artists’ books. Studio art faculty use them to teach their students about working in the book form. Art history students use them for research. Local and visiting artists consult them for inspiration and instruction. Most of our artists’ books are kept in a cabinet behind the desk, but they are available to the public upon request and we’re always delighted to share them.

So what exactly IS an artist’s book?

It’s not the same as a deluxe edition showing an artist’s work – those are usually referred to as livres d’artistes. It’s not even necessarily an example of fine bookbinding or printing. Instead, an artist’s book is a work of art that makes use of the characteristics of a book, and can only exist as a book. As Dick Higgins says in his introduction to Artists’ books: A critical anthology and sourcebook:

Heather Weston's books do an excellent job of marrying form and content, as in "Binding Analysis: Double Bind".

“[An artist's book is] a book done for its own sake and not for the information it contains… It doesn’t contain a lot of works, like a book of poems. It is a work. Its design and format reflect its content—they intermerge, interpenetrate.”

Although their roots certainly reach back through the millenia, artists’ books have been a distinct medium since the mid-twentieth-century. For detailed histories, see Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artists’ Books and Betty Bright’s No Longer Innocent: Book art in America, 1960-1980.

As a regular feature on our blog, I’ll be writing about artists’ books from our collection. I’ll discuss how they work and where they fit in our collection and the field of artists’ books in general.

So please stay tuned! In the meantime, you can check out our research guide on artists’ books. You can also see a full listing of the titles in our collection. If you’re interested in learning more about a specific book, please email me at hockensm@email.unc.edu. I’d be happy to send you more information or write a future entry about it!

– Josh Hockensmith