Printmaking & Book Arts

Decker Library's Special Collections has many examplars from the history of printing, printmaking arts, and book arts. All of these can be seen by request at the Research Help desk on Saturday-Thursday 12 to 6 p.m. and Friday 12 to 4:30 p.m.

Twenty prints from linoleum blocks

Prints by students at the Maryland Institute illustrate Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Call Number: NE1330 .M37 Special Collections  Publication Date: between 1920 and 1926?

If you would like to work with the Library's Special Collections, here is your invitation!

- To discover what's in the collection, search our catalog and limit the search to "special collections"

- Search in the MICA Digital Library to see images of our Book Arts collection, MICA Archives, Graduate Theses, and more.

- We are continuously developing the collection, so if there is something specific you would like to see included, or even a general idea of something you would find inspiring (for example, "WPA art & design" or "Balinese puppets") let us know about it, please! Here is a link to our form for requesting collection additions.

The collection has a wealth of visual and cultural material with potential for research, contemplation, and art-making. For example, in Spring 2016, Decker Library invited students from MICA's Book Arts courses to create an artist book based on materials from the library's collections. The exhibition Fertile Ground: Artists Respond to a Collective Geography resulted from that collaboration.

The students were challenged to select and respond to something from Decker Library collections, to create a book art project that made sense in terms of their artistic practice and the requirements of the particular course in which they were enrolled, and to compose an artist statement about their work. All had the opportunity to have their work curated into an exhibition in MICA's Pinkard Gallery with visiting curator Cynthia Nourse Thompson '92 from the University of the Arts.

Faculty partners and their courses were Isabel Lederman (Artists' Books: Visual Poetry and Artists' Publications), Gail Deery (History of Paper Structure), and Stephanie Garmey (Mixed Media Book).

Image information:
Katie Schweitzer '18
Objet Trouvé and library source The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones (1868)

Photography by Arthur Soontornsaratool

The Book Arts Catalog at Decker Library can be browsed or searched on the MICA Digital Library.