Short answers, pulled from the story.
An artist's book is a work of art that uses the book itself as its medium, not merely as a container for images or text. One widely cited definition describes it as any book or book-like object over the final appearance of which an artist has had a high degree of control, and where the book is intended as a work of art in itself. Forms range from traditional codices to scrolls, fold-outs, concertinas, and boxes of loose items.
William Blake (1757-1827) is most widely cited as the earliest direct antecedent of the artist's book. Works such as Songs of Innocence and of Experience were written, illustrated, printed, coloured, and bound by Blake and his wife Catherine, merging handwritten text with images in a fully self-controlled form.
Fluxus, centered on George Maciunas (1931-1978) and growing from John Cage's Experimental Composition classes at the New School for Social Research between 1957 and 1959, made artists' books central to its ethos of replacing galleries with art in the community. Key examples include George Brecht's Water Yam (1963) and Yoko Ono's Grapefruit (1964). The movement also embraced the democratic multiple, producing books in high edition numbers to make them accessible to a general public.
According to Stefan Klima's Artists Books: A Critical Survey of the Literature, the term Artist's Book first appeared in print in the catalog of a group exhibition at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia in 1973. The Library of Congress formally adopted the term in 1980.
Ed Ruscha printed Twentysix Gasoline Stations in 1963 in an initial edition of 400 copies, expanding to nearly 4,000 by the end of the decade. The book documented an ordinary drive along Route 66 between Los Angeles and Oklahoma using a documentary photographic approach, and helped establish that banal, everyday subject matter was legitimate artistic territory for the book form.
Art book fairs became a central forum for building community around publishing as artistic practice, particularly following the surge in activity around the turn of the twenty-first century. The Codex Foundation launched its biennial Book Fair and Symposium in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2007. Fairs now operate in cities including Los Angeles, New York, Seoul, Tokyo, Mexico City, Berlin, Basel, and Paris.