The Arthur & Mata Jaffe Center for Book Arts at Florida Atlantic University houses one of the best book art collections in the country.
Connie Ogle has a great piece in The Miami Herald, “A new leaf: Revising the way we think about books and reading”, on Jaffe and the collection.
The collection has grown to some 12,000 items and offers “a dizzying array of subject matter and form.”
Commenting on the collection and the unique place book arts occupy in special collections, William Miller, director of FAU libraries, says ”It’s a very unusual collection. It expands the concept of what a book is. I think 100 years from now, the bulk of the books the library has will be electronic, but a collection like this is what differentiates one library from another. Not another library has this stuff. And it’s not going to be digitized. It’s the totality of the object that is important.”
Here is a video of Jaffe showing off part of the collection: