Stanford Humanities Center
“I am so, so sorry,” I told my student, “but I think I’ve given you bad advice.”
She looked back at me, clearly nervous. The pages of her final project, a beautifully illustrated personal essay, were spread out on the table in front of us. “What is it?”
“You were planning to sew this together using a pamphlet stitch, right?” She nodded. A pamphlet stitch is a simple binding that involves folding several sheets of paper in half like a Playbill and sewing along the fold. My student’s project had been printed with this format in mind, but I accidentally told her to cut out each individual page, so that there was no way to fold them together. “But don’t worry,” I told her. “I have a solution.”
Ordinarily, as a lifelong perfectionist, I would have been paralyzed by the mistake. Teaching this course, however—a course on making and reading artist’s books—had challenged my perfectionism in nearly every way. In under a minute, I had proposed an alternative way to bind the book. We would glue the spine together, a method ironically called “perfect binding,” which is used on most paperbacks you encounter in bookstores today.
I had wanted to teach this class, titled “The Artist’s Book in Theory and Practice,” in part because I love how the form encourages people to work with their hands and problem-solve on the fly. To me, artist’s books can also represent how the university, functioning at its best, sponsors community networks of art, respect, and creative practice. Last quarter, I got the opportunity to teach a small but brilliant group of five students. They all came to class on the first day with the same question: what exactly is an artist’s book?
I imagine some of my readers may be asking the same thing. The easiest way to answer is by showing rather than telling. For my students, I pulled up images from Julie Chen’s Flying Fish Press, because she is a working artist who experiments beautifully with the book form. I also passed around a few examples that I own, including an alphabetical bestiary of 26 unique artist’s prints, and a letterpress-printed pamphlet on affordable housing in New York City. I offered my students a working definition, warning them that they should feel free to change it over time: an artist’s book is a handmade object, usually made to be either part of a small edition or one-of-a-kind, that combines art, writing, and the physical form of the book into a unified whole.
I wanted to teach artist's books at Stanford specifically because our university has one of the finest collections of artist's books in the nation. I brought my students into the Stanford Library three times as a full group: twice to Special Collections in Green Library, once to the Bowes Art and Architecture Library. I watched them unbox and explore books with the care and reverence these objects seem to demand. The archives of a university library can be an intimidating and rarified place to work, and I wanted to give my students the skills to navigate such an environment directly.
There has been much handwringing lately about the state of AI and its contribution to the death of the humanities as a discipline. [1] Working with physical objects in an archive is a humanistic skill that has yet to be replaced or outsourced to AI, and I wanted my students to have that skill. Indeed, the other primary motivation for teaching a course on artist’s books at Stanford was the subject matter’s natural resistance to AI, and the use of large language models (LLMs) or chatbots specifically. My course had two major assignments. The first was a critical essay on an artist’s book in the archive, and since artist’s books are rare objects, LLMs are unlikely to be able to write about an individual one with any great success. Not only did my students learn Special Collections research skills during their first assignment, but they were also compelled to do most of their writing without the help of AI because of the subject matter. The second assignment, which led to the anecdote at the start of this essay, required students to dedicate 10 hours of their time towards making an artist’s book of their own creation. Making a physical book requires a variety of skills—printing, binding, collaging, drawing, and designing—that largely called upon the use of human hands and human creativity. My students seemed particularly energized by this part of the syllabus, pouring more hours into their projects than I required of them.
To be clear, as a teacher, I operate under the assumption that most of my students don’t want to use AI in their coursework at all. When I had an organic conversation with the students in my class on the topic, they communicated their copious frustrations with what the AI industry is doing to academic honesty, their own job prospects, and human creativity at large. When I have seen evidence of LLMs used in student writing in the past, it’s usually an act of desperation—they are overwhelmed by work or they don’t understand the assignment, and they are terrified of getting a bad grade and appearing incompetent.
The assignments in “The Artist’s Book in Theory and Practice” also taught me the value of scaffolding work, as I had to make sure my students visited the archive or prepared their materials weeks before the assignment would be due. I worked to avoid last-minute frustration. This kind of scaffolding does not have to be limited to artist’s books or archival work. It might be equally effective to compel students to submit multiple drafts of their work, a strategy some teachers have been turning to in the AI era.
Many practical concerns around the teaching of artist’s books naturally answer the “crisis of the humanities” posed by AI writing, but that isn’t the only thing artist’s books have to offer a university in crisis. The form’s natural tendency towards collaboration and outside-the-box thinking offers a refreshing take on what intellectual community can be.
To explain this sentiment, I will turn to my own history of discovering the artist’s book as a genre, which demonstrates the power of collective networks of practice. As a second-year literature PhD, I had never heard of the form. Then I signed up to take Elaine Treharne’s graduate seminar focused on archival work and the book form, mostly because it would satisfy the requirement for pre-1600 literature that I needed to graduate. This was the class where I first saw the work of Julie Chen, shown above, in Green Library’s Special Collections. We also viewed a variety of rare books with strange ephemera—scraps of paper that were wedged between the pages—which prompted me to share a project of mine with the class. I had long maintained a notebook filled with ephemera from my own purchases of used books: photographs, receipts, and letters from their prior owners. I taped the scraps between the pages of my notebook and wrote speculative essays between them, theorizing where they came from, and what they were doing there. After class, a fellow student came up to me who had taken an interest in my collection. Had I ever considered publishing something on it, he asked, or was I interested in preserving it as an artist’s book?
“An artist’s book?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
“Something one-of-a-kind,” he explained. “Like a work of art, in the form of a book.”
That fellow student, Luca Messarra, would go on to become one of my closest friends in grad school. He encouraged me to take another class called “Book Art Object,” taught by Michelle Wilson, which gave me many of the practical skills that go into bookmaking, including paper folding, paper marbling, and binding. The teacher of that class told me about a job opportunity with Stephanie Kimbro-Dolin at First Bite Press, a job that would eventually teach me most of what I know now about letterpress printing, fine binding, and woodblock printing. Stephanie also introduced me to a host of local organizations working on artist’s books in the Bay Area, including the Codex Foundation and the Colophon Club.
The point of this story is that this network of people, some of whom know each other and some of whom don’t, was essential to my education. Universities, working at their best, support networks like this one, fostering connections along an intellectual trajectory. This is true across a range of fields, with working professionals often emphasizing the importance of networks and social relations to students just starting out on their careers. In an education system based around grades and prizes, however, it is easy to forget the importance of social networks. Many students feel baffled when leaving academia for this reason—a recent Stanford grad told me that she had to learn that the “best” work, or “perfect” work, isn’t always rewarded by the world outside the classroom.
It is worth noting that the people who uplifted my education on artist’s books occupy a range of positions within and tangential to Stanford University itself: tenured professor, graduate student, adjunct or part-time faculty, and local community member. All of them have different levels of engagement with Stanford’s archive, and experience different kinds of precarity with respect to funding. I won’t attempt to speak to the complexity of their various (dis)enchantments with the university, most of which I wouldn’t know. I think it’s safe to say, however, that universities have a complicated relationship to the cities and towns where they are situated, as individuals transit within and through them. The stereotype of a “Town & Gown” culture plays up on these tensions. Typically, the “townies” view the transient, professorial, elite “gowns” with some distrust. In Palo Alto and Stanford, California, this dynamic may be quite different, with Silicon Valley providing enormous wealth and prestige far beyond what a job in the professoriate might entail.
Fears of elitism on both sides of the aisle undoubtedly plague Stanford and Silicon Valley, even though in many ways, the two communities are tightly enmeshed. The accumulation of both private and institutional wealth is worth discussing, precisely because it plays an important role in the life of artist’s books. These works typically cost thousands of dollars, and it would be remiss of me not to address the important financial consequences of this reality.
Why this high price tag? In part, because the artist’s book is an innately collaborative form, with a single work often representing the labor and creativity of several individuals—writer, artist, designer, printer, and binder, to name a few common players. The costs of materials are also significant, as most artist’s books use archival-quality cotton paper, book cloth, leather, and ink. All these components, as well as the tools, presses, and physical spaces required to make books, can cost a great deal of money.
The university archive is therefore essential to the survival and transmission of artist’s books on a practical, financial level. A key way that art book makers and small presses continue to make work is by obtaining subscribers—often university libraries—that commit to buying some or all the work they produce. Stanford librarians Albert Bender and Roberto Trujillo were particularly notable for their commitment to purchasing and donating these works, with a focus granted to California fine printers and bookmakers. Their work was foundational in creating Stanford’s collection of artist’s books that my students viewed and wrote about.
Artist’s books reinforce the message that collaboration is complicated and often expensive. Teaching students the value of community collaboration, however, is worth the price tag. The value of an intellectual community is supposedly what many students are paying for when they come to Stanford University, after all—a community that will teach them new skills for four years and continue to sponsor their career development for the rest of their life. You can’t work on artist’s books without feeling the presence of supporting humans: the Special Collections librarian who retrieves the book for study, the student worker at the print lab who helps you with the Risograph machine,[2] the long list of names in the book’s colophon explaining its creation.[3] Not to mention the friend, teacher, or peer who tells you to look closely at book forms in the first place. Here, let me show you, tilt the book on its side, look closer—we are all stitched tightly together, just like this bookbinding, tied to one another by a nearly invisible thread.
Notes
[1] For examples, see Chronicle of Higher Education’s "The AI Issue" as well as Graham Burnett’s piece in The New Yorker “Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?”
[2] An innovative Japanese printer that operates using the same principle as screen-printing: it automatically creates a stencil out of rice paper and allows the user to print one color at a time through that stencil.
[3] A paragraph typically found at the end of an artist’s book or fine press edition, which explains how it was printed, the font and paper choice, and the labor of its various contributors.
