I started working at the John Hay Library my first semester at Brown and didn’t leave until after graduation. At the end of my four years, I’m considering the materials I never would have seen if I didn’t have this job: books over five-hundred-years-old, whaling ship logs, handwritten letters from distant periods, world war propaganda posters, signed poems from some of the greats, obsolete scientific instruments, an astronomical almanac from 1774 with impossibly intact flower pressings carefully stored between its pages, Inca scrolls, Cuneiform tablets, and so much more.

The group of objects that interested me so much that I scheduled my own appointments to the Reading Room were artists’ books. I don’t mean biographies on artists, or books that were donated by artists of note; I’m referring to books that were designed and made as art objects. Artists’ books are distinguished by attention to materials and construction, and often they have a concept that transcends what is written and pictured on their pages. The paper might be handmade, the images and text might be letterpress printed, the binding might be ornate and exposed, the paper might be folded into noteworthy forms, the materials might be uncommon for the form, and the book is made in an edition that is plausible for a small press or a single artist to produce. These small editions mean you won’t find this book online for cheaper than your local bookstore. You won’t find it at all–unless you’re looking.

I started looking after I took Art of the Book, a studio art course that meets in the Walter Feldman Book Arts Studio in the Hay’s basement and asks its students to produce their own artists’ books. One day that semester, the class visited RISD’s Special Collections, where we spent several hours looking over artists’ books. There were pop-up books, books that were all folds and no binds, books inviting us to trace our fingers over their pages to feel their bumps. One book, made by artist Islam Aly, was aromatic, made only with paper that enclosed various spices. I was drawn to a letterpress pamphlet by Sarah Nicholls, which was bright and botanical with careful text. I later met Nicholls at Printed Matter’s New York Book Fair and was excited to ask her how she achieved the palettes in her prints and to subscribe to her triannual letterpress mailings. That day at RISD, I remember thinking, “I work in a special collections library. There must be things like this at the Hay, right?” Of course there are.

For the two semesters after I took Art of the Book, I was the TA for the course, so the class visited the John Hay Library in addition to the RISD Special Collections. Each library considers the other when making new acquisitions, discouraging overlap so the breadth of their collections is wider. During the summers I stayed in Providence, I made my own Reading Room appointments to view artists’ books by Walter Hamady, Ruth Laxson, Julie Chen, Angela Lorenz, Walter Feldman (whom Brown’s Book Arts Studio is named for), and others. I kept notes on my favorites and returned to visit them.

Many of them use language as part of their medium, sometimes making puns central, like in Ann Kalmbach and Tatana Kellner’s Pistol Pistil: botanical ballistics, which focuses on words that are used both in referring to vegetation and militaries, noting the ubiquity of violent language. It features screenprints on a one-sided accordion with smaller folios sewn into some of the folds, and at one point an envelope with a dried slice of squash that still smells. At one point there’s a pop-up, as if every book arts skill was suggested as belonging in the project.

Some book artists replace words with images in blocks of text, like Laxson who combines images to make a message you have to guess at before understanding (and that someday will be more difficult to decipher as common language changes). Hamady similarly inserts images throughout blocks of text, his tiny ornaments depicting bicycles and airplanes only a centimeter wide each, their impressions clear recesses in handmade papers. Feldman takes a more painterly approach to the conflation of image and text, his gestural woodcuts suggesting letters without spelling words.

Remember when you went into a bookstore as a child and were drawn to books with glitter on the covers or pop-ups inside or tiny envelopes with treasures? Artists’ books are these without needing approval from a large publishing house and simplification for mass production, so there is more freedom in content and more artistic processes involved. Sometimes these artistic processes read as incredibly professional and careful, like in Julie Chen’s works, which are clean, vibrant, and so geometrically interesting that each is undeniably a work of art from box to colophon. Others are less refined, perhaps having a spine that crackles when opened because it was over-glued, or a front cover that falls over the book at an angle because the spine is larger than the pages. The obviously handmade can be ideal for some projects, like a book with textural handmade paper, or Jen Bervin’s The Desert, an erasure book that employs machine sewing on paper to rewrite John C. Dyke’s 1901 book of the same title.

Small editions also mean these books are harder to find. My favorite artist book to date is Walter Hamady’s Hunkering, the last Gabberjabb[…], which was produced in an edition of 160 variants. It is a collage-like amalgam of marbled paper, letterpress printed ornaments and various texts, found paper objects, handmade papers, mesh pages, anatomical drawings, nonsense texts, superfluous footnotes, embossings, satirical imagery, and more. I found a copy for sale online for around $6,000…not exactly an accessible book for the casual researching artist.

Since you can’t buy most artists’ books at your favorite local bookstores or check them out at your public library, special collections are one of the best places to view them–and they must be viewed in person. Yes, you can request a digitization of one, but don’t bother; some artists’ books may have rich content, but they are objects of play and want interaction. They want to be touched, moved, and sometimes even assembled by the viewer (like in the case of Julie Chen’s World Without End, a diamond-shaped book that becomes a globe on a crescent-shaped stand, or Angela Lorenz’s Soap Story, where pages are revealed only through dissolving a set of soaps.) They take advantage of a book’s ability to hold secrets and play with form using pages of varying sizes, compartments, translucent vellums, tactile printmaking like letterpress and embossings, carved book board, unconventional containers, and more. They answer the question, “Why read a physical book when you can read a pdf?” They are best known through personal experience, which makes them more than worth visiting the Hay.