The Book and Media Art Collection is home to more than 25,000 illustrated books from the dawn of the printing press to the present day. The 1906 acquisition of the private collection belonging to Berlin architect Hans Grisebach consisting of works on typography and book design from the 15th to late 18th centuries forms the historical backbone of the collection.

The collection of New Book Art (NB) was decisively shaped by the German book art movement, a reform movement around the turn of the 20th century that sought to improve the formal, technical, and artistic quality of book printing. Publications by the by the English Kelmscott Press and Doves Press, as well as by the German Janus Presse, Ernst-Ludwig-Presse and Bremer Presse, bring Hans Griesebach’s collection further into the 19th and 20th centuries as do numerous illustrated books from France, England and Germany by other publishing houses. The collection also includes books produced by the avant-gardes, with their new ideas on book design, including works by Jean Arp, Max Ernst, El Lissitzky and Kurt Schwitters.

A concerted effort to focus on artist’s books conceived and designed by artists as works of art began in the 1980s. The collection expanded with acquisitions of Jasia Reichardt’s visuallyarticulated concrete poetry, the Fluxus collection of Hanns Sohm, book objects from the collection of Rolf Dittmar, as well as the artist’s books produced by the Franklin Furnace Institute in New York. The avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s set the stage, embracing a pluralistic definition of book art that still prevails. One example is reflected in the acquisition of the KIOSK Collection belonging to publisher Christoph Keller, an archive of publications on contemporary art. It features more than 6,000 publications by numerous artists, galleries, museums and publishers.

• Making the Visible Visible – Open Access to Berlin’s Typographical Legacy