Art Books

A friend of mine from work and I took a nice little lunch excursion today. We headed up to the Utah Museum of Fine Art to see The Guild of Book Workers 100th Anniversary Exhibition. It was a very interesting exhibit. Some books were pretty traditional, others extremely beautiful and artful and some were downright funky; to the point where I’m not sure I’d call them books. It was quite fascinating to see the range of creativity exhibited. There was even one that included glass art. The cover was made of wood, and embedded in the wood were a bunch of small dichroic glass cabochons, which the artist called glass stones. The only inside picture that could be seen looked like a watercolor painting of colored glass stones. One thing that I found a tad dissatisfying about the exhibit was that everything, just as one would expect in a museum, was under glass. I wanted to be able to pick up and look at the books, to actually see what was inside, rather than just the outside, or the displayed pages. I guess in my mind the book isn’t just about the cover, but what’s inside also counts. I guess there’s some truth the saying “you can’t judge a book by the cover”. These were pretty amazing covers; I can’t imagine the books contents were too lacking.