Book Review: Freedom of the Presses: Artists’ Books in the Twenty-First Century edited by Marshall Weber

Abstract

Freedom of the Presses: Artists’ Books in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Marshall Weber. Booklyn, 2018. 218 pp./$25 (sb). The nonprofit book arts organization Booklyn describes their 2018 book Freedom of the Presses: Artists’ Books in the Twenty-First Century as a “textbook and a toolbox.” Edited by Booklyn co-founder Marshall Weber, the collection gathers a rich variety of ­contributions—from historical and critical essays to excerpts of artists’ books—and ties them together with an emphasis on the medium’s potential to strengthen communities and promote social justice. By examining the production, reception, collection, and scholarship of artists’ books, Freedom of the Presses trades in-depth criticism of a single bookwork in favor of a holistic view of artists’ publishing. This is a welcome contribution to the discourse at a time when the term “publication” is often used as a convenient catchall for projects that aren’t quite books, without much consideration of the practice of publishing and the public it constructs. As a collection, Freedom of the Presses differs from much of the book-length scholarship on artists’ books. Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artists’ Books (1995), Clive Phillpot’s Booktrek: Selected Essays on Artists’ Books (2013), and Michael Hampton’s Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the Artists’ Book (2015) are just some of the tomes in which a single author writes about many artists’ books. Freedom of the Presses is a book by many authors, writing about relatively few books. It lacks the systematic taxonomies and replete bibliographies of works by Drucker or Keith Smith, for example, but is able, thanks to those earlier works, to wander further afield. Freedom of the Presses brings artists’ books into dialogue with socially engaged practice and activism in much the same way Drucker aligned them with twentieth-century avant-garde movements. The book’s multiple authors and diverse perspectives help account for the breadth and complexity of the contemporary situation. First-person accounts, manifestos, conversations, and interdisciplinary …