From introduction: “The original idea, soon abandoned, was to attempt to describe a regional style. In any case, ‘regional style’ would be a stretch. There is in fact an international community of book artists; it really does seem impossible to categorize the myriad styles regionally. What I can say is that a tradition of radical bookmaking in California extending back into the nineteenth century has led to a certain openness here about what a book can be, and proved hospitable to the flourishing artist’s book movement in the early ‘70s…You will find in this exhibition occasional examples of high achievement in the traditional crafts of fine printing and bookbinding. They appear here almost by accident, only because some artists happen to have had an interest in mastering these disciplines. This is emphatically a show of artists’ books, with all of the expressive debris and excess that seems to follow this unruly form like the tail of a particularly gaudy and aberrant comet.”
Featured artists: Wallace Berman, Kathleen Burch, Frances Butler, Marylee Bytheriver, Ann Chamberlain, Julie Chen, Bonnie Cohen, Betsy Davids, Marie Dern, Alisa Golden, Georgianna Greenwood, Susannah Hays, Mark Head, Charles Hobson, Diane Jacobs, Alastair Johnston, Lisa Kokin, Seth Kroeck, Mary Laird, Graham Mackintosh, Ruth McGurk, Howard Munson, Michael Myers, Nance O'Banion, Patricia Olynyk, Asa Peavy, Luis Delgado Qualtrough, Sonya Rapoport, Coriander Reisbord, Felicia Rice, Artemio Rodrigues, Judith Serebrin, Svea Seredin, Anne Hicks Siberell, Melissa Slattery, Indigo Som, Rich Spelker, Seiko Tachibana, Holbrook Teter, Donna Thomas, Peter Thomas, Gretchen Treuting, Katherine Venturelli, Kathy Walkup, Anna Wolf, Arne Wolf, John Woodall, Dorothy Yule.
Old no. AAR.EC.0118