ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses an under-investigated form of Shakespearean appropriation: artists’ books, which can include unique books bound and printed by artists; limited-run livres d’artiste or texts illustrated with prints from an individual artist; fine letter-press print editions; and altered, sculpted, kinetic, pop-up, or other books that exist not merely as containers for art (text or image) but as artworks in their own right. By an artists’ book, I mean a book made by an artist that pays attention to books as material objects with specific affordances or physical characteristics that interact with human readers, their bodies, and senses, as well as with the text that makes up what we usually call the content of the book. Such artworks “interrogate,” in Johanna Drucker’s phrase (1995), bookness, the quiddity or essence of books as phenomenal objects that engage human beings, a quality that has received attention from scholars and artists such as Jerome Rotherberg and Steven Clay (2000); Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe (2004); Garrett Stewart (2011); Robert Darnton (2009); Leah Price (with Seth Lerer: 2006); Maryanne Wolf (2008, 2018); Richard Lanham (2006); Jeffrey Todd Knight (2009); and others working within book history, textual studies, and literacy, including theorists of the digital medium such as Janet Murray (2011) or Naomi Baron (2015). 1
