Published in an issue on modern and contemporary artist's books, my article discusses a selection of livres d’artistes/livres de peintres from the collection of the Van Gogh Museum, which are often considered the predecessors of the contemporary artist’s book. The livres d’artistes mark the blurring of the boundaries between artist, writer, illustrator, and publisher in the production process of books. The book collection in the Van Gogh Museum has recently been digitized, and will be presented on the forthcoming website on fin de siècle printmaking.

This is the first thorough examination of Enrique Chagoya's codices, an ongoing body of work begun in 1992. Conceived as pseudo-historical documents, Chagoya's codices are the most intricate and sustained articulation of his core concept of "Reverse Anthropology," in which he "cannibalizes" the art and culture of Western civilization and reinterprets it in a pre-Columbian format to explore contemporary themes. The artist's ideas have been informed by the Antropofágia movement
in Brazil and his study of pre-Columbian manuscripts and post-Conquest codices. The article traces his development of the codex format in the nineties, beginning with his first unique codex in 1992 and other formative projects, followed by a sustained discussion of the editioned works of 1999-2011.

This article examines some of the unique compositional opportunities that the medium of darkfield monotyping offered Edgar Degas. Defending the idea that Degas undertook a distinctive set of pictorial experiments in monotype, I consider how typical sources of illumination are used for the purpose of cancelling the standard role that light plays in the organization of visual representations. This is, I argue, part of an important aesthetic inquiry that involves the posing of two related questions: first, what happens when a key enabling condition of visual perception (light) is removed from a two-dimensional work? Secondly, how might an artist depict the invisible in visual art? I argue that in their exploration of answers to these two questions, Degas’s darkfield monotypes privilege the sense of touch over vision for the purpose of undermining conventions that attach to the organization of pictorial space.

The article discusses what is shown on the print after Johannes Stradanus's design of the interior of an intaglio printshop that has been on the cover of Print Quarterly ever since its first issue in 1984.