What is Book Art?
Book art is a broad area of contemporary visual art where the book itself is the artwork. It can involve hand‑made books, sculptural or cut books, pop‑ups, paper engineering, book installations, photographic books where structure is as important as imagery, and more. The key idea: the book is not a container for art – it is the art.
Artists often create the content, the structure, and sometimes the container, all by hand, with each element carrying equal artistic weight.
Not all art is visual. Some books will contain words and no imagery, some books contain images but no words. The definition of book arts is fairly lose. This is a comparable new form of art, and every book an artist currently makes, shapes what book are is and can be.
The most important criteria to keep in mind is that a book artist doesn’t make a book to contain their artwork, nor do they illustrate a book. The message they want to convey and the material book are inseparable, the book and all its part together is the artwork, no part of it on their own.
Links for newcomers to artist’s books
This is a list of links that you might want to explore if you are new to book arts. They give you an idea what book art is, and where you can start your experimentation with this medium.
- Great Website to learn about book art, see different work and get discovering: https://www.accessart.org.uk/book-art/
- Some videos Hilke made as an introduction to book art: Youtube Video Playlist
- Here’s a video on a book folding project: Fold Roses out of a Book
- Here’s a video on making a flutter book
- Once you’ve clicked on a few of these youtube videos, youtube is probably suggesting a lot of these to you. If you search for bookbinding, journal making, book art, or similar terms, you’ll find plenty of things you can try out for yourself
- You might want to join the “are you book enough” monthly challenge: click here to see. There’s a theme for each month of the year (already published) and you can join one or all of these challenges. Once you made a book that fits the challenge, you can post images on instagram, see and comment on others, and people will come and comment on yours. This way you get a taste of the community already — we are in general a friendly bunch
- In this video you see Chris Fletcher show off some books collected by the Bodleian Library. What he shows there are so called “rare book” – another good search term; they are a specific type of book art. But seeing how he speaks about these works is interesting and shows how people relate to artist books, and what they have to say about them; maybe it gives you another idea what it is and what you could make, maybe: Youtube Video
- This is the UWE book arts newsletter archive. It gives you a chance to see other’s book art and keeps you informed what is going on in the world of book art: https://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/newsletters/
- Kit Davey is an interesting artist to discover. She makes book art with found objects. On Instagram she shares short instructions of her constructions and books: instagram
- This here is a book arts link list from the University of West England (UWE, who also bring out the newsletter linked to above) Click here to go to the list.
- Karen Hanmer offers a long list of workshop handouts to a wide variety of bookbinding techniques and related skills (like making cord our of thread). The difficulty level varies from accessible to beginners to very advanced. Go to the download section here.
Links for everyone
Below is a list of links and resources that may be useful to book artists and others.
Websites for artists books groups:
The Book Arts Web – https://www.philobiblon.com/tutorials.shtml
BABE and the Book Arts Newsletter – Bristol Book Arts Exhibition (BABE)
Society of Bookbinders – The Society of Bookbinders
Society of Bookbinders Book Arts – ArtistBooks Group
Library of Book Artists Sketchbooks – The Sketchbook Project
Marches Book Group – Marches Book Arts Group
CuratorSpace – curatorspace.com
Centre for book arts: londonbookarts.org/
Artists Book Centre: Artist’s Book Centre
UWE Book Arts publications: www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/publications/
Courses, Tutorials etc:
Citylit: www.citylit.ac.uk/
UWE Book Arts www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk
Domestika: www.domestika.org/en/courses/popular
Sea Lemon on YouTube
Crafting Handmade Books with Vintage Page Designs on Facebook. Run by Ali Manning with Weekly free mini tutorials on the Facebook site
DAS Bookbinding on Youtube is an excellent source of videos for all types of binding
For supplies:
Sheppard’s: store.bookbinding.co.uk/store/
John Purcell Papers: www.johnpurcell.net/
Lawrence Art Supplies: lawrence.co.uk
Jackson’s Art: jacksonsart.com
Pegasus Art Stroud www.pegasusart.co.uk
For high quality linen thread, visit bookartsupplies.com or buechertigersupplies.etsy.com
Books on book-binding and book arts:
Making Handmade Books by Alisa Golden – isbn: 978-1-60059-587-5
The Art of the Fold by Hedi Kyle and Ulla Warchol – isbn: 978-1-78627-293-5
The Book as Art, ed. Krystyna Wasserman – isbn: 978-1-56898-992-1
Books by Keith Smith – several excellent books to order from the USA
The following is a list from Darryn Schneider on his DAS Bookbinding YouTube channel of his book choices.
They are linked to Amazon and other pages if you wish to learn more.
1) Bookbinding basics
Fritz Wiese: Der Bucheinband (6. ed. 1983)
– definitely THE “classic” and vademecum in Germany, unfortunately
available in German only
Franz Zeier: Schachtel – Mappe – Bucheinband (2. ed. 1990)
– Swiss-made quality book on bookbinding basics, also available in
English as Books, boxes and portfolios“:
Keith A. Smith: Books without paste or glue – Non-adhesive binding vol.
1 (rev. ed. 2007)
– very good, detailed and richly illustrated descriptions
Vasco Kintzel: Bücher perfekt selbst binden (2005)
– simple, but straight forward and well illustrated, I use it for my
courses in basic bookbinding; again, not available in English
2) Advanced bookbinding
János A. Szirmai: The archaeology of Medieval bookbinding (2017)
Karin Scheper: The technique of Islamic bookbinding (2015)
– not as well illustrated as Szirmai, but with a lot of background
information. It is based on her PhD thesis.
Kojiro Ikegama: Japanese bookbinding (2005)
– good explanations, many illustrations, and lots of background information
3) Special topics
Roger Green: A comprehensive guide to box making (2020)
http://www.buchbinderei-green.de/video-a-comprehensive-guide-to-box-making/
– the ‘missing manual’ on box making
Fritz Wiese: Sonderarbeiten des Buchbinders (1984)
– another German “classic”, that continues where the other “Wiese” (see
above) ends
Robert Barclay, Carole Dignard and Carl Schlichting: The gentle art of
applied pressure (2004)
– a small but helpful volume about going beyond what you can do with a
bookbinder’s press