Just before she disappeared down the rabbit hole, Alice was wondering whether a book could really be a book without pictures and conversations. The two books that she herself starred in had both.

Alice would have enjoyed wandering around a new show called Blood on Paper at the Victoria and Albert Museum too because it is about books made by artists, combining pictures and, well, not necessarily conversations, but certainly words.

The great pioneers of the artist's book were based in Paris, and most of the greatest were made before the Second World War. Picasso, who lived in Paris for large periods of his life, made about 150 during his long and manic working life.

Later on, as this show so excitingly documents, artists wrested the idea of the book out of the hands of publishers and designers, and started to make the kinds of things they wanted to make.

The show begins just after the Second World War with a great swansong of the Parisian artist's book, Jazz by Henri Matisse, made in 1947. It's a combination of words by Matisse himself, in which he ruminates on his working practice as a painter, and marvellously colourful, sweeping brushwork, engulfing double-page spreads. Sometimes the artist's book fails because it seems not to be much of a collaboration at all - the art and the words exist side by side in a kind of sullen, I'm-going-my-own-way relationship. Matisse's book is a wonderful example of the polar opposite - he was solely in charge of everything that was written and painted.

The idea of the artist's book developed once it had moved away from Paris and had become fashionable in such places as New York and London. It also shows us how the idea of the book changes. Now a book doesn't really have to be a book in the old sense at all. It can turn into a kind of symbolic repository.

Look at Damien Hirst's project, New Religion, for example, that dominates the centre of the show. The space is long and narrow, with side aisles going off it to left and right. Hirst's giant pieces are raised on a plinth at the point where the “nave” meets the “transepts”. They resemble huge boxes or tombs, with drawers and a lid, which, when opened, reveals a skull, a heart with needles sticking out of it and a cross. In the drawers, which are partially pulled out, are sets of prints, with such names as Stations of the Cross. It feels like lapsed Catholicism overcompensating for itself. “Is this a book?” I ask the co-curator of the show, Rowan Watson. “Well, what is a book?” he shoots back. “Isn't it as much an idea as an object? It reflects categories of thought created by the human mind.”

Another interesting book-thingy in this section is by Francis Bacon. We see the contents of an old suitcase, full of stuff that would have been kicking around his studio - photos, sketches, smeary rags, etc. The piece is called Detritus. These are not the real things though. They are exact reproductions.

The most towering work in the show is a book by that master German bookman and maker of paintings for the castle walls of giants, Anselm Kiefer. It's made of lead and stands upright at the entrance to the show, pages splayed open. This is a 6ft, unbudgeable, wholly symbolic book-object, whose lead pages are covered with strange lines - they remind you, at a glance, of star charts - and long and complicated numbers, and it relates to Kiefer's abiding fascination with the 17th-century physicist and astrologer Robert Fludd. Don't try to open this book, or worse, take it away. In that direction lies a hernia.

The single greatest frustration about this show is that almost all these open books are in vitrines, and you can see only one spread. Most of what each artist has done, all that colourful invention, is lost to you, behind closed pages. Luckily, Watson gives me a way out. “Well, a good half of the artists' books displayed in this show are owned by the Victoria and Albert Museum. And if you go up to the library you can ask to see them.”

Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book is at the V&A Museum, London SW7 (020-7942 2000; www.vam.ac.uk), from today

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