The artists' books in Literature and Rare Books' collection cover a broad range of topics, implementing different design features in order to convey the books' message. These books are not limited to a single topic, and you will often see overlap between different topics in one book.
A great example of topic overlap featured in our collection is Madness: Reading Hamlet in the Time of Covid-19 and Other Plagues (2022) by Emily Martin, which uses Shakespeare's Hamlet as inspiration to contextualize the fear and isolation of living through of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as additional current events like Black Lives Matter, the rise of Asian hate crimes, and the January 6th insurrection.
This guide provides a sampling of the topics that appear within our artists' books to help give a better idea of what you might find in our holdings. If you would like to learn more about the different topics of artists' books we have, you can search our holdings on UMD Discover or contact us!
