Within their respective text’s, Borsuk and Drucker identify an “artist’s book” not as a strict definition, but rather, a “‘zone of activity’ by artists and writers who create books as original works of art that ‘integrate the formal means of [their] realization and production with [their] thematic or aesthetic issues’… as long as the impulse is to create an original work of art through the accumulation and juxtaposition of these materials…” (Borsuk 115). I love this definition because it leaves so much room for interpretation. The key word being the “zone of activity” is denotatively vague. The emphasis is not on the end product, rather, the way in which the product is created–the activity. Even the wording of “zone” feels fluid–zones change, they imply social construction.

Later, Borsuk identifies the dialogical nature between reader and book, revealed by how “artists’ books continually remind us of the reader’s role in the book by forcing us to reckon with its materiality and, be extension, our own embodiment” (147). The wording of materiality and embodiment imply non-living and living. Books are made of material, people are made of bodies–thus Borsuk makes the argument the dialogue is between the book and the person reading it. When reading a book for information, one is reading to understand what the author is saying. In other words, they are seeking a conversation between themselves and the author. Borsuk contradicts this notion using artists’ books. The dialogue is not between what information the author is trying to convey and the reader. Otherwise, it would not be an artists’ book. The dialogue is, rather, between the book and the reader. The material and the body.