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 1970s. 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 Conceptualism, and how the book arts’ own mini-art world of the 1970s was shaped by seminal exhibitions, fledgling nonprofit organizations and collectors.

Actionist, maker of objects, writer and graphic artist Dieter Roth created an exceptionally diverse and convoluted oeuvre. In Lucerne he published a series of small ads twice weekly in the newspaper Anzeiger Stadt Luzern und Umgebung, consisting of an aphorism and signed by his initials. Embedded in advertisements from real life, these ads conjured the surreal, subversive side of existence as in statements like “A good beginning is an evil end”, “A tear is as evil as a good word” and “Two tears are better than five stones”. The paper’s bourgeois readers raised such a protest over the disturbance of their peace by such enigmatic profundity that the paper felt compelled to terminate publication after 248 ads. From 1973 to 1979, Roth published his statements in artist’s books, titled The Sea of Tears (with the original pages of the newspaper) and Sea of Tears 1–5. This is the first complete, chronological publication of the ads, along with an English translation.