Associate Director for Collections Management
Lower Level
speccoll.library@pratt.edu
About the Collection
The Artists' Books collection encompasses books crafted, published, produced, or altered by an artist, including works resulting from an artist's collaboration with artist-run organizations, colleges, universities, galleries, and museums. The collection also includes non-book works that represent a conceptual renegotiation of the traditional book form. In general, the artists books we collect have been conceived as artworks in their own right and produced in open or limited editions, as well as democratic multiples.
This collection is developed in close cooperation with faculty members teaching courses related to the Book Minor, and is particularly geared toward serving as documentation of a variety of Artist Book practices and formats that can serve as examples and inspiration to students engaged in creating their own book-based works. For research tips and information on how to make your own books, visit the Artists Books' Guide.
To schedule an appointment to view special collections materials or for more information about access to Special Collections, please contact speccoll.library@pratt.edu.
Don't see an artists' book you think we should have? Use our Suggest a Purchase Form, and we will take your request into consideration as we make our collection decisions.
Video of How Books Work (Flying Fish Press, 2010) used with permission of Julie Chen and Clifton Meador. Flying Fish Press, 2010.
New to the Collection
She Feels Your Absence Deeply: A Family History Woodblock by Call Number: 709.04075 A235Publication Date: 2021She Feels Your Absence Deeply utilizes materials from artist Golnar Adili's archive of letters, photos and printed matter once owned by her father. The collection spans from 1979, when Adili's family migrated back to Iran from the US, and continues through 1981, when her father escaped Iran for fear of persecution due to his activism. Inspired by children's puzzle books, images are printed on six-sided cubes allowing the viewer to obscure, reveal, mix, and match the intimate artifacts from Adili's collection. The blocks are housed inside a portfolio box that opens flat and carries the print of the airplane ticket used in the final leg of her father's long journey from Iran. When the box is closed the airplane hugs the blocks, keeping the events inside until they unravel again to tell a visual story of how a family was affected by larger political shifts.
There Have Been and Will Be Many San Franciscos by Call Number: 709.04075 A917TPublication Date: 2016I feel extremely lucky to have grown up in San Francisco -- to have been raised on liberal politics, health food and the local science museum. Every day I moved through neighborhoods that operated in different languages, over beautiful hills and past colorful victorians. But like everyone else, I have deep and mixed feelings about the place I'm from. It's loaded with memories and associations, and now, San Francisco is going through a particularly fraught and vulgar period. I feel disconnected from the new culture of the place, but I'm still in love with the buildings, the fog horns, the smell of the air, and the views from various public steps. I used to criticize the city for being stagnant and now I lament how much it is changing. You really can't ever get it quite right with the place you're from. This book a love letter to San Francisco -- to all its good parts and good people and the peculiarity that runs all the way to its center. It's also my way of making peace with the fact that the same place will always be different. You can't step in the same river twice.
Paper paper film by Call Number: 709.04075 Y42Publication Date: 2019"Paper Paper Film is an artist facsimile of an educational film box set on paper and printing. The original box set was published in 1983, purchased by the Carnegie Mellon University in 1987, found in a storage closet at Carnegie Mellon University in 2016, and published in the form of a paper sculpture by the Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY in 2019."