Title-pages and chapter-vignettes structure the temporal flow of the narrative as it rhythmically unravels in time across the pages. Even in their most basic elementary form, graphics, including typographic embodiments of text and margins framing the body of text on a page, as well as empty white spaces, are not merely aesthetic and stylistic embellishments. They are value-laden codes that impinge directly on reading as a cultural practice, shaping new experiences and modern conventions.

Modern Arabic poetry and postcolonial literature found their visual interpretation on the pages of books, launching a trend that saw contemporary Arab artists increasingly engaged with the book as an artistic form. The examples exhibited reveal the wealth of artistic contributions to books, showcasing various imaginative approaches and styles, from abstract to figurative expressions and techniques. These books mirror the experimental fervour of Arab artistic movements of the time as well as the spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration between literary, poetic and visual arts in the Arab world. In their page compositions, illustrated books conventionally maintained a separation between text and image; the former typeset on one page and the latter inserted on a separate facing page or sequence of pages/plates. In these examples, artists had generally little to no input in the page layout, which was conventionally designed at the printing press.

A particularly remarkable symbiosis between book arts and modern Arab painting of this period is the movement of hurufiyya as manifested in the rise of illustrated poetry anthologies and artists’ books. Of note here, for instance, is the modern poetry series published by the Iraqi state in the early seventies that coupled notable poets with contemporary Iraqi artists such as Dia al-Azzawi, Shakir Hassan al-Said and Hashim Samarchi. Deriving from the root harf, meaning letter, hurufiyya refers to modern aesthetic experimentations in Arabic calligraphy and free handwriting as embodied spiritual and artistic gestures. Through hurufiyya, artists subverted the conventional hierarchical separation between text and image in books, exploring instead the visuality of words as images on the page.

The standard layout of illustrated Arabic books was challenged as the book in its different narrative, material and formal elements came to be envisioned as an expressive unity. Such bookworks often combined previously separate creative practices associated with the Arabic press (cover art, illustration, calligraphy, typography, page layout, colour, binding and size) into one unified creative activity. Whether designed on commission to offer an interpretation of a given text, or independently conceived as an artist’s book, bookworks radically redefined the modern Arabic book beyond its conventional textual centrality since the advent of the Arabic press, inviting new modes of reading, seeing and handling the book as a unified aesthetic entity.