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When reviewing history from the perspective of the present, specifically the contributions and importance of books produced by artists from the sixties and seventies onwards, when viewed from the current situation, a surprising updating occurs of the emergence and recognition of Fluxus, conceptual or minimalist artistic practices, but, above all, of the production of artist books and publications during that period.

It was in the early 1960s, the same decade in which conceptual art was formulated, when a truly different approach emerged regarding the conception of artist books, as well as their realization and the form of distribution. During that period, the book occupied a central place in the production of relevant contemporary artists, while also being the subject of critical theories about authorship (or, rather, the lack of authorship), the elimination of text or image in the book and, no less importantly, about the impact of new technologies on the mass production of works of art.

The artists who decided to work with the book as a plastic medium, assumed that their publications, in addition to functioning as an artistic product, would work as purely communicative instruments produced through more economical systems and would be easy to obtain. They set out to work with the techniques and printing processes that were most advanced at the time, the reproduction of black and white photography through offset or Xerox, which allowed them to produce numerous editions quickly and at low cost. And, according to these criteria, they radically distanced themselves from previous productions, the so-called livres d'artiste or illustrated books, as well as from any of the other commitments of artists who used the book in the first half of the twentieth century.