Artists' books have re-emerged as an energetic contemporary artform over the turn of the century. Developing from their last materialisation in the 1960's as a way of bypassing the constraints of the gallery ; as a vehicle for the dissemination of ideas and a radical format of bringing art to a wider public through artists self-publishing their work. This notion of making art in an affordable non wall-based format led to the growth of what we now recognise as the artist's book.

As part of our research at Artists' Books at the Centre for Fine Print Research, Bristol, UK, we explore many aspects of artists' publishing : from the conception and history of the artist's book to creative processes and output, current developments and critical assessments of the subject. Through our research projects and collaborations, we hope to widen critical discourse within the book arts field.

All of our artists' books projects, news, events, lectures, essays, papers, symposia and exhibitions are archived online on our CFPR bookarts web site. Many of our public lectures, symposia talks or published essays are available on the publications or events pages as free PDF or audio downloads.

As part of our investigation of contemporary book arts practice we also publish the Book Arts Newsletter, the Artist's Book Yearbook, a bi-annual publication with essays and information on many aspects of the book arts, and The Blue Notebook journal for artists' books.

As part of our research, we also collaborate with other institutions and partners interested in artists' books. We also loan artists' books from our collection on a no fee basis - to set up exhibitions and events promoting the artist's book to a wider community.

We also run an annual art project, Book Marks : Infiltrating the Library System, which is an ongoing series of free international distribution of bookmarks made by book artists, to help promote their work and to get the public involved with artists' books. Over the last five years, the Bookmarks series has visited 83 venues in Italy, The Netherlands, UK, Germany, Poland, Spain, Canada, Japan, Poland, Brazil, Croatia, South Korea, New Zealand, Cyprus, Australia, and the USA, and 250 artists have contributed 25,000 bookmarks to the annual projects to date.

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