The art of a book is in its prose, right?

Sure, a few works that top best-seller lists might have cleverly designed covers, but they’re two-dimensional, flat, computer-generated.

Fifty books and banners on display through Dec. 15 at the Spencer Museum of Art shatter the aesthetic that deems books only as beautiful as the messages in their text.

“Wrapped Words: Handmade Books from Cuba’s Ediciones VigÃ-a,” an exhibit traveling on loan from Michigan State University, packs the White Gallery with textured eye-feasts that nearly beg to be touched.

The books were handcrafted at Ediciones VigÃ-a, a publishing cooperative in Cuba that combines poetry, short stories, literary criticism and children’s literature with charming folk art. Co-op artists use scrap paper, dried leaves, fabric swatches, yarn, sand, coffee grounds and cut-out images to decorate the book covers.

Primitive equipment is used to print as many as 200 copies of each book, but the intricate covers are each reproduced by hand. The impulse to feel the materials, flip through the pages, is great.

“When you show them in a museum context, you violate that a bit,” said Patrick Frank, a Kansas University assistant professor of art history who specializes in Latin-American art. “It’s a little regrettable that they’re going to be under glass.”

A computer accompanying the exhibit will allow visitors to virtually flip through the pages of select books.

Frank visited the 17-year-old co-op a year and a half ago during a trip to Cuba. In a building just a few blocks off the coast in Matanzas, a city east of Havana, about a dozen artisans work collaboratively to create the books.

Their efforts continue a rich history of cooperation between writers and artists in Latin-American art history, Frank said.

“There’s a tradition of poets and artists collaborating together to make beautiful books,” he said. “It really flowers in the 20th century.”

The cooperative publishes work ranging from the mystical poetry of St. Teresa up to modern puppet theater. One banner in the Spencer exhibit, “2 poemas de Langston Hughes,” prints two works by the American poet who spent much of his childhood in Lawrence and traveled, among other world destinations, to Cuba. English versions of Hughes’ “Cross” and “I, too, sing America” are juxtaposed with the poems in Spanish.

Frank paid about $80 and brought six of the books  several of which duplicate pieces in the Spencer exhibit  back to the states. A few include playful pop-up elements like those found in children’s books.

Though each books produced by the co-op is unique, the work has in common “a childlike sense of wonder,” Frank said. “It purposefully looks unsophisticated and sincere. How charming.”