It is to an art dealer, rather than an artist or an author, that we owe the phenomenon of the modern artist’s book. Back in 1895, Ambroise Vollard had only recently arrived in Paris and begun representing artists such as Cézanne and Renoir. "Strolling along the quays," he recalled in his memoirs, "I dipped one day into the books in a second-hand dealer’s box. On the title-page of a fine octavo I read: Ambroise Firmin-Didot, éditeur." That got him thinking: "Ambroise Vollard, éditeur … that wouldn’t look bad, either."

Soon, he wrote, "my only remaining hesitation was whether to publish prose or verse." He settled on verse and chose a work by Paul Verlaine, whom he considered to be the greatest living French poet. Vollard’s stroke of genius was to pick as illustrator not an established commercial engraver, as would have been customary, but one of his growing stable of young artists. The assignment went to Pierre Bonnard, who thus became the first of Vollard’s peintres-graveurs—that is, serious painters whom the dealer encouraged to experiment with printmaking techniques (or, to put it another way, virtual slaves that the wily dealer put to hard labor in the back rooms of his gallery).
 
The resulting book, Parallèlement, came out in 1896, unfortunately just after Verlaine died. While experts can and do quibble, this small volume, with its 110 lithographs rendered in ethereal pale red surrounding the text, is generally accounted the first "artist’s book."

Of course, illustrated books have existed since ancient times (the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Maya codices, medieval illuminated manuscripts), and printed books with printed pictures date back to the 15th century. In 1499, the Venetian publisher Aldus Manutius brought out the bizarre and beautiful I (The Strife of Love in a Dream), with delicate woodcuts that dance in and out of the text blocks.

Nonetheless, when collectors say "artist’s book" they mean a deluxe limited edition (a few hundred copies or less) illustrated with prints of some kind by a recognized modern artist. The classic period extends into the 1950s, after which the contemporary phase begins, with a whole new approach and aesthetic.

Vollard was followed by other publishers who expanded the concept and generally brought their books to press with far fewer delays and mishaps than he did. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, another legendary Parisian dealer, commissioned books from Georges Braque and André Derain, among others, and starting in the 1930s, a Swiss publisher, Albert Skira, brought a new level of professionalism to the concept. His first book, which came out in 1931, was a French translation of Ovid’s poetic summary of classical mythology, the Metamorphoses, with a suite of etchings by Pablo Picasso that captured the shape-shifting quality of the Greek gods and heroes in a simple, clean-lined style.

In 1934 the Greek-born French publisher known as Tériade (Stratis Eleftheriadis) brought the Surrealist aesthetic to the genre with Salvador Dalí’s illustrated edition of Les Chants de Maldoror by the so-called "Count" de Leautréamont and in 1947 brought out one of the very greatest artist’s books, Henri Matisse’s Jazz. Executed in brilliant tropical colors using a stencil technique called pochoir, based on Matisse’s paper cutout, this was the first book fully conceived by the artist; Matisse even wrote the text and hand-lettered it. Previous artist’s books had more reflected the desires of the publisher to create an expensive edition of a favored text, which in many cases the artist had little or no interest in—Picasso never even read the Metamorphoses before doing his etchings. The illustrations frequently had only the most tangential relationship to the text at hand, and today collectors value such books almost entirely for their pictures.