Title: Book as Artwork 1960/1972
Author: Germano Celant
Originally published by: Nigel Greenwood Inc., London, 1972
Re-publisher: 6 Decades Books, Brooklyn/NY
Format: 97 pages, 0.6 x 14 x 17.8 cm, paperback, English
ISBN: 978-0-9829694-0-3
Originally published in 1972 by the Nigel Greenwood Gallery, Book as Artwork 1960/1972 was the first catalogue devoted to the then new medium of the artist’s book and it remains a canonical reference (though one that, due to its scarcity, is not as well known as it should be). This publication started as an article and a list of about 80 artists’ books which appeared in 1970 in the first issue of the Italian magazine Arte. Not long after it was translated and published in Data magazine. Then in 1972 the Nigel Greenwood Gallery in London mounted an exhibition of artists’ books and issued a catalogue with a greatly expanded bibliography (now nearly 300 titles) compiled by Lynda Morris. The exhibition was the first of its kind and the catalogue a genuinely historic publication.
From the book:
“The book is a medium that requires no visual display, other than to be read, and the active mental participation of the reader. The book imposes no information system but the printed image and the word; it is a complete entity in which both public and private documents are reproduced. The book is a collection of photographs, writings, and ideas—it is a product of thought and of imagination. It is a result of concrete activities, and serves to document, and to offer information as the means and the material of art.”