Urawa Art Museum, which opened in April as the second public museum in Saitama Prefecture, is currently exhibiting 220 books created by 20th-century Western artists.
The new city museum, located inside the Urawa Century City hotel and restaurant complex, focuses on collecting local artists' works and artists' books.
"We wanted not only to collect local artworks, but also to create a museum with its own individual character, because it opened much later than other museums. We decided that collecting [artists'] books as artworks could be significant. This is the first time that [artists'] books are being collected by a museum as artworks in Japan, and I hope the idea will spread [to other museums]," said Hajime Morita, curator of the museum.