On the website of Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, under “What we collect,” there’s an intriguing designation: “Printing History and Book Arts.” The description reads:

The Book Arts have been a collecting focus of RBML since its inception in 1930. It contains both “books about books,” that is books about paper and other substrates, ink, illustration, typography, typefounding, printing, binding, and collecting; as well as examples of fine printing and book illustration.
Our artists’ book collection contains many examples of fine printing and book illustration, as well as some items that stretch the designation of the word “book.” Usually housed under the BOOKARTS designation in CLIO, it’s worth a look to see the many unique examples of art-as-book hiding within the RBML stacks. The collection contains many books relating to Jewish Studies, and only a sample of them can be shared here. Take a look for yourself!

Because of the focus on fine print and bookmaking, the books in the collection go back quite far. Thus a fine copy of a Hebrew grammar, Otsar leshon ha-Kodesh by Santi Pagnino (Lyon, 1529) would be included in this designation, in large part due to its decorated title page and multiple typefaces.
By the early 20th century we see a huge variety of art in books, as avant garde artists used the codex to produce an incredibly diverse array of material. We discussed Issachar Ryback’s haunting art in a previous post, and there were many artists like him in the early 20th century who turned to art to express emotions or thoughts on current events. Arthur Szyk, for instance, produced an incredibly poignant volume after the horrors of WWII called Ink and Blood: BOOKART NC314.P76 Sz99 1946 Sz99 Folio). His drawings included biting captions like the one on the left, showing two Jewish children as “dangerous enemies of the Third Reich.” The color of the ink is all red-tinged, no doubt invoking the “blood” in the title.
Artists also decorated literary works, as we see in Marc Chagal’s illustrations for Khalyastre, a Yiddish literary journal (below, the 1924 edition):



The Soncino-Gesellschaft der Freunde des jüdischen Buches was founded in 1924 as the first Jewish bibliophilic society focusing on the Jewish book. They produced a number of publications, which included both fine art books and books about the history of Jewish book production. Some of these books are already in our collections. This year, we were able to acquire a copy of the Soncino Gesellschaft Pentateuch (1930-1933), the last great publication from this society before the rise of the Nazis required the group to shut down. There is a wonderful exhibition online about the society (along with many digitized volumes) at the Jewish Museum of Berlin.


Modern artists have also utilized classic and contemporary Jewish texts in their work. We have seven examples in the collection of artwork related to the poetry and writing of Abraham Sutzkever’s poetry, as well as fine press copies featuring the work of Hebrew literary figures such as Amos Oz and Hayim Nahman Bialik.


Ismar David, a noted Hebrew type designer and artist, created a beautiful Book of Jonah featuring line drawings and Hebrew/English text in vibrant colors, with blue, yellow, purple, and black. The line drawings were intentional, as a nod to the Jewish prohibition against drawing a graven image of a human.



More recently, artists have pushed the boundaries of what a book is – does it need to contain text? To have pages?

Becky Slemmons’s They did not know that the books were already in our head is an excellent example of this phenomenon. It is a book made from glass. Upon learning about Kristallnacht while in residency in Germany, the artist decided to make a book that had to be treated with care as a repair for all of the violence of “The Night of Broken Glass.” Each page contains a blue dot representing a synagogue in Berlin; placed above a map of the city, one can see all of the locations where synagogues were present prior to Kristallnacht.
Another book-like art object is Paper bridge = פאפירענע בריק. The book is encased in a box, with layers of paper showing pages on top of pages, folded together in many different ways. Per the creators, Ellen Schechner-Johnson and Michele Burgess:
It explores the legend of the ‘paper bridge,’ seeking to express the historic liminality of Jewish existence, the image of the wandering Jew, the subjects of displacement, homelessness, and disconnection–of belonging and not belonging. The poems by Kadya Molodowsky, written in 1930 and 1942, express this specifically, and are placed as touchstones or buried treasure within the collaged fragments of Yiddish and other language texts and expressive etchings by the artist.




Many of the artist books in the collection defy photography – the act of reading the book is a physical one, that can’t be reproduced in a digital way. This is the case with Mira Coviensky’s Meditations of silence and Word, made from transparent mylar and aluminum leaf – it’s readable only while holding the individual pages apart, and supporting the accordian spine. Lynne Avadenka’s By a Thread unfolds in many ways, with each unfolding revealing a new layer to the text, showing an interplay between Queen Esther and Scheherazade. The Judaica book arts collection is truly one best experienced in person – most are cataloged in CLIO, and we encourage you to come and check them out.