The appreciation of the book as an art form can be traced back to the core of the ancient civilizations: mysterious hieroglyphics on papyrus in Egypt, colourful scroll books in Japan and China, vibrant early Islamic books and the meticulous work of medieval amanuensis. All these examples exploited the great advantage of combining text and decoration, in order to achieve a perfect balance where the image would emphasise the contents and vice versa.

More recently, with the modern utopia of opening up art to the masses and make it available and affordable to the most, the artist's book format has been investigated and developed as an artwork with equal dignity as other major arts. In the early XX Century, the European market was dominated by the French tradition of le livre de luxe, thanks to the activity of Ambrose Vollard. The publisher carefully selected artists and writers to create elegant works in limited edition, commanding high prices from an eager bibliophile market. Vollard's effort was definitely not democratic and didn't mean to reach a large public, yet it achieved the important record to make the work of the artist as important as the writer's, for the very first time in the history of publishing. He sponsored and printed works by Honoré de Balzac and Pablo Picasso, Paul Verlaine and Pierre Bonnard, Paul Valéry and Eduard Degas, Gustave Flaubert and Odillon Redon, amongst many others.

Esempio di composizione tipografica di Morris

In England, Morris established the Kelmscott Press in 1891. He set out to prove that the high standards of the past could be repeated - even surpassed - in the present. The books Morris produced were therefore medieval in design, modelled on the incunabula of the fifteenth century. Morris's roman 'golden' type, for example, was inspired by that of the early printer Nicolaus Jenson of Venice. Noteworthy for their harmony of type and illustration, Morris' main priority was to have each book seen a whole: this included taking painstaking care with all aspects of production, including the paper, the form of type, the spacing of the letters, and the position of the printed matter on the page. Kelmscott books re-awakened the ideals of book design and inspired better standards of production at a time when the printed page was generally at its poorest.
With the turn of the last Century, after the First World War, the avant-gardes conveyed their attention to the book, as a field prone to experimentation. The Dada and the Surrealist movements investigated the book form, creating three-dimensional book-objects (Marcel Duchamp), collage novels (Max Ernst) as well as typographical experiments (Filippo Tommaso Marinetti).

In the 1960s, the successful growth of the book market and the intellectual recognition accorded to conceptual art drove artists to start using the artist's book format more frequently and often to publish their own books in order to gain the total control of the production, to procure at least some of the profits usually taken by the editors. The 1960s and the 1970s saw a huge surge of artists self-publishing own books, as well as manifestos, invitations, greeting cards, images in all formats. Especially in the United States, we assist to a revolt against the so called “high art”, the exorbitant prices as well as the consumerism of galleries and art-dealers. The artist's book format suited fine artists like Andy Warhol, Edward Ruscha, Lawrence Weiner, Sol Le Witt, as it enabled tremendous possibilities of expression, through images, text and the exploitation of volume and space in a sculptural way. The radical group of artists and writers working under the collective umbrella called Fluxus had a huge influence on artists' publishing and during their relatively short and busy activity, John Cage, George Maciunas, Daniel Spoerri contributed more than any other to define the artist's book into its contemporary format.

Paul Laider , Mental Health , 2001

In the early 1990s, water-based screen-printing and affordable desktop publishing programmes have led to many more artists being able to produce their own books. The recent developments of archival digital print output and the continual broadening of design programmes such as Photoshop™, Quark Express™, In Design™, Illustrator™ have offered accessible self publishing opportunities for the artist's book production to a whole new and young generation. Even at this point in its development, the artist's book is an evolutionary artistic format.

Unique books, altered books
Some artists create works that treat the book as a sculptural form. They are often made as unique books, emphasising the physical structure rather than worrying about creating something that can be held and read.
The altered book requires again a different approach: it can be described as an art form in which artists “recycle” or “transform” existing books into new works of art. The book, an artwork in itself, becomes a canvas for new ideas and images. Altered books are a rapidly growing part of the craft world, but they are actually an old method of recycling. In the Eleventh Century, Italian monks recycled old vellum manuscripts by scraping off the ink and adding new texts to the blank pages. This process – known as palimpsest – left parts of the old text visible through the new. Today this practice does the same by removing pages, adding pages, photographs, cards and other inserts, tearing, cutting, gluing, stitching and painting. The idea of cutting up an existing book may seem disturbing somehow, but books are routinely destroyed in much more disturbing ways than anything that an artist can commit. Publishers shred mountains of remaindered volumes they can no longer sell and libraries discard books they can no longer house. Recycling some of these “rejects” is a way to bring to new life a patrimony otherwise doomed to be disposed off.