ART EXHIBITS : It’s an interesting chapter in creativity when artists do it by the book.

Bookworms and art lovers alike will be intrigued by the unusual exhibit opening today at the Palos Verdes Art Center. Displaying the work of 46 California artists, the exhibit consists entirely of bookworks--artistic creations in which artists use the book format to transmit their ideas.

Occasionally, an artist might include a bit of text within a work, but bookworks, though they take the form of books, are not for reading in the literal sense.

“Their pages are to be ‘read’ with the eyes and also with the hands,” said Judith A. Hoffberg, curator for the show and a recognized collector and expert on bookworks.

Most of the pieces in the exhibit will stand alone as sculpture and some can actually be touched. The artists in the exhibit have explored a range of techniques and materials used in bookmaking, including color laser prints, painting, offset lithography, glass and letterpress. Some of the bookworks are three-dimensional sculptures not unlike children’s pop-up books.

Bookworks date back two centuries to William Blake, the English poet and artist who put his drawings and writings into books that he and his wife published themselves. This exhibit, however, presents one of the few opportunities today to view a broad array of bookworks by many different artists.

As an art form, bookworks are flourishing but they’re still a relatively obscure phenomenon in the mainstream, commercial art world, which is gallery and museum-based, Hoffberg explained. “Galleries don’t know how to deal with these,” she said.

Several trends in late-20th-Century America have contributed to the popularity of bookworks as an art form. Among them is the advance of modern feminism. During the late ‘60s and into the ‘70s, women kept journals in which they charted the advance of their own consciousness-raising, Hoffberg points out. For the woman artist, then, the bookwork was a familiar format, which explains why women artists are so heavily represented in the exhibit.

Bookworks were also born of the modern artist’s drive to push the boundaries of traditional art, meaning traditional construct or materials. The size, material and format of bookworks created a dramatic departure from traditional easel painting.

“You don’t need a studio,” Hoffberg said of bookworks. “You can use the kitchen table.”

The bookwork format also allowed artists to eschew the gallery and museum shows that determined an artist’s monetary success. Bookwork artists could use the U.S. Postal Service to spread their work around, thanks to such newfound technology as offset lithography, which let them publish their work.

Like pop-up books for children, bookworks could also become staples in the commercial world, if the recent success of a mass-produced look-alike is any indication. The “Griffin & Sabine” trilogy has been a staple on the bestseller list for a year. A novel and soon-to-be movie, “Griffin & Sabine” is a transoceanic love story chronicled via letters and presented as an interactive book in which readers must pluck each new chapter of the story from lushly decorated envelopes attached to the pages.

The art center exhibit, which will run through Oct. 9, is called “Shaped Structures: Bookworks in Form.” It is in the Beckstrand Gallery of the art center, located on Crestridge Road, three miles south of Pacific Coast Highway, in Rancho Palos Verdes. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday, 1 to 4 p.m.