Urawa Art Museum, which opened in April as the second public museum in Saitama Prefecture, is currently exhibiting 220 books created by 20th-century Western artists.

The new city museum, located inside the Urawa Century City hotel and restaurant complex, focuses on collecting local artists' works and artists' books.

"We wanted not only to collect local artworks, but also to create a museum with its own individual character, because it opened much later than other museums. We decided that collecting [artists'] books as artworks could be significant. This is the first time that [artists'] books are being collected by a museum as artworks in Japan, and I hope the idea will spread [to other museums]," said Hajime Morita, curator of the museum.

During the 1980s and 1990s, there was a rush to build regional public museums in Japan. Many museums were large in scale and purchased expensive masterpieces in order to attract visitors. Now, following the economic downturn, these museums are finding it difficult to add to their collections because of reduced funding. Urawa Art Museum's approach offers an innovative way of dealing with these new financial constraints.

"Because the books are reasonably priced," museum director Mitsuru Sakamoto said, "we can cover all the major art movements in our collection by acquiring artists' books that are representative examples."

A limited number of exhibitions of artists' books have taken place in Japan since 1978, when Seibu Museum first introduced the works as art forms in their own right. However, compared with the situation overseas, the number of exhibitions remains low.

This exhibition, "Another Door: The Art of Books in the 20th Century," chronologically covers the main currents in the history of Western artists' books.

The exhibition begins with "The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer" (1896), a gorgeous hand-made volume designed by William Morris, a driving force in the English Arts and Crafts movement. Four years in the making, the book is made of white pigskin and features 87 woodblock prints by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, along with beautiful Gothic lettering and black-and-white grapevine designs by Morris.

Pierre Bonnard's "Parallelement" (1900) showcases his Art Nouveau-style lithographs and woodblock prints alongside the verse written by Paul-Marie Verlaine. Featuring dreamy female nudes rendered solely in dark red, the book was the first collaborative work between a painter and a writer to be published.

The book prompted French art dealers to ask famous artists such as Picasso and Matisse to illustrate books, and livres d'artistes (artists' books) became an established art form. A boom in the publication of the books followed during the period 1920-1950 in France, fueled by demand from collectors who were attracted by the reasonable price of the volumes.

Pablo Picasso illustrated more than 150 books in his lifetime, exhibiting a different, more relaxed style in comparison to his other work. Picasso created black-and-white Cubist lithographs to illustrate the 1911 volume "Saint Matorel," a work of fiction written by his friend, the poet Max Jacob. Works like these in the exhibition offer viewers a chance to see a different side of well-known artists like Picasso through their book illustrations, and in many cases demonstrate that the artists were also accomplished at writing stories and poems.

Along with the graceful French livres d'artistes, developments in printing technology and photography were prompting the growth of a different kind of art book movement. Avant-garde groups such as the Russian Avant-Garde, German Expressionists, Italian Futurists, Bauhaus and Fluxus used books as a tool to assert their ideas and philosophy. German Expressionists, who expressed strong feelings of anger or sadness in their art and had a close relationship with literature and the theater, produced many art books between 1907 and 1927.

The Italian Futurists rejected traditional grammatical and poetic forms and created revolutionary new layout styles. "Les Mots en Liberte Futuristes," a 1919 work by poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, featured "poems" created by scattering random letters and numbers, and influenced the style of many modern and contemporary artists.

The Italian Futurists admired industrial technology, and in 1932 created an amazing experimental "machinery book." All 30 pages of "Parole in liberta futuriste tattili termiche olfattive," by painter and ceramist Tullio d'Albisola, were made of metal, including the cover. This was made possible by inventing a new technique that allowed the letters of Marinetti's poetry and his portrait to be lithographed on metal for the first time.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Surrealists played a major role in fusing art and poetry, treating both as equally important.

Among them, Joan Miro was the most active book artist, creating 258 art books in his lifetime. In the 1956 work "Makimono," his typical, vivid motifs were drawn on an Oriental makimono (scroll). He also collaborated with Japanese poet and critic Shuzo Takiguchi on the work "En Compagnie des Etoiles de Miro" in 1978. Takiguchi, who was a friend of Miro's, wrote a Japanese poem for the volume.

On the cover of the catalog for the International Surrealism Exhibition in 1947, Marcel Duchamp used a ready-made objet, a rubber breast. From that time on, artists started to create book covers and bindings as art objets in themselves, which were dubbed libre objets. In order to express their artistic style, artists began focusing on the book covers more than the books themselves, making it difficult to say whether their works should be categorized as books or purely as artwork.

One such work is Duchamp's innovative "Boite-en-valise" (1961), a portable "museum" showcasing small replicas of his major work, such as a small ready-made toilet, a typewriter cover and a miniature version of "L.H.O.O.Q," his "Mona Lisa" with a mustache.

Other unique libre objets in the exhibition include Andy Warhol's cheerful "Andy Warhol's Index (Book)" (1967). In this book each page has a pop-up paper objet of one of Warhol's motifs; the page displayed at the exhibition shows a Hunt's can.

Since 1970, some contemporary artists have used books as a major theme in their work, including Christo's "Modern Art" book wrapped in plastic and flax strings, and Anselm Kiefer's large-scale book "Herbstzeitlose (Autumnal Crocus)" (1997), which used real sand on photographs to depict desert scenes.

One problem when exhibiting artists' books is that viewers cannot pick them up and look at each page. The museum has helped solve this by setting up several computers in which viewers can take a look at each page of books by eight major artists, and by displaying reproductions of some other works.