Two thousand years ago, the Alexandria Library was a beacon of learning, boasting the largest collection of knowledge in the known world. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina, opened in Alexandria, Egypt in 2002, builds on that ancient heritage, as a multifaceted cultural center with collections of antiquities and books. In 2004, it mounted the First International Biennale of the Artist's Book, featuring works by artists from Greece, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy, the United States and Egypt. The gesture behind that exhibition--gathering artist-made books from around the world--resonates with the ancient library's history of collecting works from the entire known world.

This exhibit recreates the American section of the Biennale, organized by artist Suzanne Reese Horvitz. Each participating artist contributed one work, a multiple, which became part of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina's collection at the show's conclusion. The current show has been augmented with more works by some of the participating artists, and work by three Egyptian artists including Khaled Hafez, the Biennale's General Commissioner.

As we move further into the age of digital information, artist books take on new layers of meaning. Many artist books arose as a response by artists to the mechanization of bookmaking, and asserted the importance of handcrafting, along with the sensuous experience of handling and reading a book. Now, we can imagine a time when the transmission of information via books may be considered as quaint as traditional oral transmission of knowledge seems to us now. The book, in its archetypal form of pages bound serially between covers, becomes more precious in its current vulnerable state of cultural flux.

The wide-ranging of works here demonstrate the traditional strengths of artist books, even as some of them reflect the sensibilities of the evolving digital plenum in which they take part. Some of these book works seem to be about words, writing and language. In Lydia Hunn's Alphabet Book , from 1970, the artist transformed letters and numbers through playful repetition, into abstract visual patterns. Nancy Atakan, an American artist living in Istanbul, has created a book refracting the word "tea" through the different words and associations it takes on in many cultures. Hussein Abdel Basset's portfolio of block-printed images show iconic shapes suggesting hieroglyphs, floating in a kind of noosphere--Teilhard de Chardin's posited plane of thought surrounding the planet--above what could be the curved horizon of the earth.

A number of artists have deconstructed the bound-book form, from Mary Phelan with her accordion-format Ossuarium and Bradley Adams' surprisingly-hinged Garden 54: terminus . Sandra Lerner's sly reversible pop-up, He-She , stands alone, free of pages or cover. Dottie Attie's exquisite Sometimes a Traveler--There lived in Egypt offers a miniature portfolio of Orientalist images in its own tiny box, with images, text and form all redolent of the era of Victorian travel.

The book's objecthood seems paramount in Douglas Beube's book work, with its delicately fire-laced, unreadable pages, and Robbin Amy Silverberg's Brush , with its compelling textures of hair and handmade paper. In a different way, Patricia M. Smith's beautiful, small-scaled book Hours is an object that invites being held. Barton Lidice Benes, represented here by a published book depicting some of his projects, is known for assembling materials into fetishized objects of pseudo-worship.

Humble materials provide a different spin to the handcrafting of artist books. Khaled Hafez and Denise Carbone's work here embodies the Duchampian tension of the lowly reconfigured into beauty. Hafez' Diary of Detritus and Detritus II , and Carbone's Fragments make us take a fresh look at items and materials discarded or ignored. Ahmed Refaat's cast-paper imprints also gain power from their simple reclaiming of the foot in its barefoot state. Similarly, Carol Moore's A Woman of a Certain Age , with its fan shape, and Silverberg's broom-shaped Duster , both recall the forms of women's lives in earlier periods, while inscribing texts on their paper elements--Moore's work includes her own words and those of women writers of the Renaissance.

In artist books, the image may share equal weight with the word. Anne Sue Hirshorn's Variations on T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton , and Merle Spandorfer's Five Elements offer eloquent visual counterbalances to their texts. Susan Viguers' Portrait of a Daughter and Portrait of a Son have the intimate feel of children's picture-books, with the heft of adult emotion.

Several artists have integrated digital techniques into their work: Suzanne Reese Horvitz, whose subtly-layered and richly-toned images suggest stained glass, and Robert Roesch, whose illustrations mix processed photographic images with pure shape and line. Claire Owen, while committed to letterpress and other traditional bookmaking techniques through her Turtle Island Press, shows a work, Pentimento , which owes its images and text to digital reproduction processes.

Like any book, an artist's book can be the vehicle for a powerful message, manifested in a distinctive way. Edward Hutchins' World Peace offers a book in the form of a four-part sphere whose message unfolds in the palm of one's hand. Christopher Wilde and Maureen Cummins have created works that vibrate with the horror of effects of war and slavery. Wilde designed the book Lt. Shrapnel , about the inventor of shrapnel, with pages of paper embedded with bits of metal. Cummins' book The Business is Suffering , exhibited here in unbound excerpts, reproduces letters documenting the business of slavery in the 19 th -century United States; the words speak chillingly for themselves.

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