Nearly every exhibition catalogue now contains an interview with, or related statement by, the artist. How and why did this become the norm? The increasing popularity of the artist’s words is traced back in this article to its roots in Romanticism, the rise of the mass media and the cult of the avant-garde artist. The value and reliability of the transcribed and printed words is questioned and a bibliography of published interviews with artists follows.

The project of creating a catalogue of Nordic collections holding artists’ books, initiated at ARLIS/Norden’s annual meeting in Helsinki in May 1996, was the starting point for a survey of the material held in Icelandic art libraries. This focused on the type and size of the collections of artists’ books in four art institutions covering twentieth century art in Iceland, and examined the current documentation standards applied to artists’ books in Icelandic collections and the extent of national bibliographic control.

A l’occasion d’une recherche documentaire en vue d’une exposition, la Documentation du MNAM-CCI a mené une expérience de numérisation sur l’un de ses 30 000 dossiers d’artistes, celui du groupe Supports-Surfaces. Le principe de navigation retenu permet, sans aucune difficulté, d’accéder à l’ensemble des ressources du dossier réparties en quatre sections. La recherche de l’utilisateur se trouve facilitée par une base de données donnant les références des documents numérisés, affichables à tout moment.

Research in preparation for an exhibition provided the opportunity for the Documentation Centre of the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne-Centre de Création Industrielle to carry out an experiment to digitise one of its 30,000 artists’ files, on the group Supports-Surfaces. The navigation principle adopted allows easy access to the file’s contents, which have been divided into four documentation types. A database giving references to the digitised documents facilitates user research.

Established in 1960, the Museum van het Boek is known for its holdings and exhibitions of Western book art from the last 110 years. Building on the starter collections of two donors, a private printer and a bibliophile, the Museum’s acquisitions now focus mainly on modern book art. More than 25,000 of the 450,000 objects in the Museum are books showing the development of standard Dutch publishing, the work of individual book illustrators, type designers and calligraphers, contemporary Dutch private presses and artists’ books. There is also considerable foreign material, notably from Germany and Great Britain.

‘Nieuwe Kunst’ is the Dutch variant of what is known as Art Nouveau or Jugendstil in other parts of Europe. As far as book art is concerned, the highlight of this style was between 1892 and 1903. When interest in Art Nouveau began to flourish again in the 1960s, private individuals and libraries in the Netherlands started to collect Nieuwe Kunst books; these collections reflect a varied production, in form as well as in content.

Books are an extremely significant part of our cultural heritage. For this reason visual propaganda on their behalf is very important, since so many of them are treasures in storage. And the problem of their low profile could be solved by organising temporary book displays and creating special museums for books. The Vladimir-Suzdal Museum in Russia is setting an award-winning example.

The recent exhibition James Joyce’s typewriter and other stories: books at the London Institute was jointly curated by a librarian and an academic tutor. The aim was to demonstrate how six special collections in the London Institute’s Libraries and Learning Resources were relevant to the courses the students follow. In parallel, students from the Institute’s Book Arts MA created artists’ books influenced by one of the collections, and these were displayed in the exhibition alongside work by bookbinding and print media students.

Curating is not a question of self-indulgence, self-expression, it’s a question of certain duties …. A guest curator muses on her role in setting up an exhibition in the new facility in the Library and Archives of the National Gallery of Canada, and describes the double-edged sword of freedoms and perils presented by an exhibition area that is sited within a museum setting but remains other.