"Loney's personal approach is strong medicine--an antidote to the worn discourses that drain the concept of the book as a work of art of all meaning."
- Peter Koch, The CODEX Foundation, California

"With grace and wise-ranging erudition Alan Loney dismantles the exclusive and elitist myths regarding both book and work of art in our digital age. This is a most welcome celebration of book and artmaking in all their specificity and materiality."
- Marion May Campbell, Deakin University, Australia

In Search of the Book as a Work of Art is a probing series of questions about how we understand the words 'art' and 'book' and what happens when we put them together. It argues that the categories by which we have distinguished different kinds of books no longer tell us what we are looking at when we look at new books, including many being made by trade publishers. Categories like 'fine press book' and 'artist book' have served useful purposes in the past, but are now redundant in the face of the incredible range of categorical overlaps in books that people are actually making. Along the way, this book explores and explodes a number of current ideas about books whose use-by dates are seen by the author as well and truly passed. The author proposes that ordinary language is the clue to how the old, traditional and historical categories are no longer adequate or relevant.