Book Art Turns Over a New Leaf : Printing: Artists turn their hands to books at Pasadena’s Armory Center for the Arts.

To take the idea of what constitutes a book and mess around with it until sometimes it doesn’t even contain words is, in some eyes, sacrilege. To others, and to artists especially, it’s fair game, a marvelous stretching of the limits of expectation.

One hundred examples of what has happened when artists turned their hands to books fill the airy space at the Armory Center for the Arts, something of a pleasant discovery itself in Pasadena’s Old Town. “California Artists’ Books” may even spark a little debate about what constitutes an artist, since it includes everything from the early 1960s efforts of Ed Ruscha and Wallace Berman, to the finest of letterpress printing by such masters as Ward Ritchie and Susan E. King to a book of riddles with blockprinted illustrations made by children 8 to 14. (“What do you call two banana peels? A pair of slippers.”)

Among these examples of the way the book form can be stretched, wood-burned, etched or origami-folded are metal books, a book whose pages shelter a tiny bird’s nest and spotted egg and a wooden book whose eight or so “pages” hang from the ceiling and whose tale of dubious behavior must be read by peering through a window cut in the first page and following as circuitous and devious a path as the writer claims he does.

There is a log of one author’s dreams done in photo-collage and a rollicking satire called “Say, See, Bone, Lessons From the French,” in which a hapless writer has made her own translations of French and in meticulous handwritten notes on the pages, a French teacher (real or faux) has pointed out the calamitous ways in which the writer has gone wrong. Very French indeed.

The shape of a book is challenged: A beautiful work about mountains is mountain-shaped, and opened in display to its fullest so that its rolling shape and earthlike texture can be appreciated. And to show that the effect of the famous Dadaist fur teacup and saucer still lingers, there is a book covered in what looks like Dynel gorilla.

There is the breathtaking volume “Walls” by Tom Killion, who was a backpacking young artist-around-Marin-County a decade or so ago; from that period came his definitive “Fortress Marin,” marked by fine woodblock illustration. Now he has written about his travels throughout the world, illustrating it with more than 30 color woodblock plates and even more two-color ones, in an edition limited to 100. The woodblocks are in six colors, the notes at the book’s last page mention simply that each volume required 199 pulls of Killion’s hand press. Little wonder that in Los Angeles Dawson’s Rare Books has only a single copy of this glorious book, nor that it’s $950.

So what is this Armory collection? Fine art? Cottage crafts? Inspiration or desecration?

It will depend on your viewpoint. Most importantly this is a show that leads to considering just how one feels on the deepest level about books themselves. Faced with a children’s storybook, cut out to reveal collage pictures inside, I found myself more protective then I could ever have imagined about something between two covers. But driving home from the show I had to admit that I’m probably more reverent about books than is sensible. It took years before I could simply stop reading an awful book. Seeing someone turn down the corner of a page to mark his place is painful; even as a cookbook gets its honorable imprint of a wineglass set down inadvertently or a bit of spattered grease, I sigh. Philosophically I am probably not far from Hilaire Belloc, mock-moral though his words may have been:

Child! Do not throw this book about;

Refrain from the unholy pleasure of cutting

all the pictures out!

Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.

Yet the other part of a book being a book is that, 99% of the time, it is for the hand as well as the mind. So there’s something peculiarly constraining about a show of contemporary book/artworks that have to be appreciated by a glimpse of one or two opened pages.

One can understand it when the setting is the Getty Museum and the book is that 15th-Century Flemish rouser “The Vision of Tondal,” whose illustrations lend themselves to reverent terror and very low light. But there’s a double bind working here in the Armory show.

Once a text catches you, you’re hooked, as with the fragment from Harvey Mudd’s poem “The Plain of Smokes” that can be read through the case:

There’s not much that’s noble

about detective drudgery

twelve hours a day

in a mortgaged automobile.

Out in the shark-colored air

that eats the lung.

The impulse is to turn the page, to get on with the story and see how Ken Price’s illustrations illuminate it. Luckily, in the case of Mudd’s poem, a $6.50 bookstore paperback can fix things. In the case of Killion’s “Walls” satisfaction is a lot harder to come by, but the impulse to see more of that volume is overwhelming. The irony is highest when a book of artwork about the planets, made out of zinc Braille pages, is marked “Please don’t touch.”

Jay Belloli, who has curated this show and laid it out engagingly, is well aware of the dilemma that these one-of-a-kind editions cause. He’s set a selection of more affordable, larger edition books out in the open (prudently tethered). Here you can browse contentedly among little gems like Jaime Robles’ deadpan “New and Improved Guide to More Homes of the Stars,” a pullout satire in which the “stars’ ” homes are walk-up apartments and pink and stucco predominate. And before the show closes Jan. 5, there’ll be one more walk-through, Nov. 21, which will allow handling of some of the books.

Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave. Pasadena; (818) 792-5101. Tues.-Sun., noon to 5 p.m.