Book Arts and Artists' Books: Selected Links

Artists' Books Online is designed to promote critical engagement with artists books and to provide access to a digital repository of metadata, scans, and commentary. The project serves several different communities: artists, scholars and critics, librarians and curators, and interested readers.

The Book Arts Guild [BAG] was formed in Seattle in 1979 to support the diverse disciplines of the book arts and has been actively dedicated to promoting all hand bookmaking crafts and contemporary book arts for 30 years. Today the Guild counts among its members bookbinders and conservators, papermakers, paper decorators, people in all forms of printing and typography, calligraphers, artists who create images through printmaking, painting and photography and many others who are involved with the making of books.

The Center for Book Arts is committed to exploring and cultivating contemporary aesthetic interpretations of the book as an art object while invigorating traditional artistic practices of the art of the book. The Center seeks to facilitate communication between the book arts community and the larger spheres of contemporary art and literature through exhibitions, classes, public programming, literary presentations, opportunities for artists and writers, publications, and collecting. Founded in 1974, it was the first organization of its kind in the nation.

he Guild of Book Workers was founded in 1906 "... to establish and maintain a feeling of kinship and mutual interest among workers in the several hand book crafts." Among its early members are well-known artist-craft workers such as bookbinder Edith Diehl and printers and typographers W.A. Dwiggins and Frederic W. Goudy.

he San Francisco Center for the Book fosters the joys of books and bookmaking, the history, artistry, and continuing presence of books in our culture and enduring importance as a medium of self-expression. We provide both a home for Bay Area book artists and a place where the wider community can discover book arts.

As the largest and most comprehensive center of its kind in the nation, Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA) celebrates the book as a vibrant contemporary art form that takes many shapes. From the traditional crafts of papermaking, letterpress printing and bookbinding to experimental artmaking and self-publishing techniques, MCBA supports the limitless creative evolution of book arts.

The Virginia Arts of the Book Center, a program of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, exists to promote the values of the humanities through appreciation of the arts of the book, visual and verbal literacy, creativity, and the fostering of traditional and contemporary skills. To this end we operate a working studio and print shop to which community members may gain access and through which they can gain training in the art and crafts of printing, printmaking, and book arts. We strive to bring professional artists into contact with students, interns, and community members.

The Mission of the Women’s Studio Workshop is to operate and maintain an artists’ workspace that encourages the voice and vision of individual women artists, to provide professional opportunities and employment to artists at all stages of their careers, and to promote programs designed to stimulate public involvement, awareness and support for the visual arts.