The American artist Richard Prince (born in 1949 in Panama, lives and works in New York) is one of the pioneers of appropriation art.

By re-photographing advertising images or recycling elements of popular culture, which he reframes or reproduces, silkscreens, enlarges, or rearranges within collages, he raises—through the play of the empty signification that characterizes these clichés—questions about the foundations of American mythology, as well as authorship, plagiarism, intellectual property, and the circulation of images.

Christophe Daviet-Thery’s Bibliothèque d’un amateur is devoted to Richard Prince’s publications from 1981 to 2014, focusing on a central and often autonomous aspect of his artistic practice: the book as medium. The publication considers Richard Prince’s books and editions as a coherent body of work and makes them legible as an integral part of his artistic practice.