This is a tough book to review. I *think* it's sort of groundbreaking -- that is, it assays a territory of art-making that hadn't received much prior attention. So, kudos to Drucker for this. The book is problematic, however, because the problems inherent in art books generally -- reproductions rarely give you a good sense of the works -- are multiplied: there are loads of images, here, but they are black and white and they are very small ... and since books for the most part consist of *sequences* of pages, what you are getting (except in I think a single case where Drucker shows you multiple pages from one work) is thus very much a small part of a whole. The reproductions are necessarily that much less satisfying than they typically are in books about art.

And so Drucker *has to* take up the slack with her verbal descriptions -- she *has to* give you a sense of these works verbally, because the reproductions *have to be* less representative. Does she succeed? Well, sometimes. When I started this book my immediate reaction to Drucker's writing was "hmm -- this sure feels academic." And I meant that as a criticism: I meant "academic as in I feel like I'm trying to chew on a mouthful of modeling clay." But in truth it's not that bad ... except when it is. This isn't helped, either, by the fact that the text could have sure used at least one more copy-editing pass than it evidently got. Finally, for a book that's about artist's books, the book itself has a ramshackle, thrown-together feel that's less than satisfying: the cover design is, to my mind, pretty poor; the font Granary Books employed seems to be incomplete, since it appears to have no numeral 1 (instead, a capital 'I' is used). Perhaps this latter is intentional, a design choice, but it feels slapdash ... and so in the end you have a book about artist's books that is, itself, rather inartistic. This is all subjective, of course.

It's a shame, because I've tried to find copies of some of the works Drucker covers. They ain't in the library, and you'll shell out a lot of money to secure copies, yourself (the exception in my case is Tom Phillips's A Humument). ( )