My friend Arley Bondarin was an accomplished photographer, a modest collector of prints (he had pictures by Edward Weston and Lisette Model), and an avid buyer of photography books. When he died about 15 years ago, Arley left a floor-to-ceiling bookcase filled with great books; I think he had just bought each new book of photographs as it became available and put it in its proper alphabetical slot on the shelves. It was like magic knowing that if you wanted to see any particular photographer’s work, you could go to the spot where the books with his initial should be, and the chances were his book would be there. For someone like me, who would rather look at pictures than talk to people, it made visiting a particular treat. Pig heaven, really.

“The Open Book: A History of the Photographic Book From 1878 to the Present,” on display at the International Center of Photography, assesses the effect of pictures presented in books on the development of the medium. The exhibition follows on the publication in 2001 of “The Book of 101 Books,” edited by Andrew Roth, in which he nominated his picks for the most important photography books ever, and the publication last year of Martin Parr’s stunning, two-volume “The Photobook: A History.”

Photobooks came into being with the appearance between 1844 and 1846 of William Henry Fox Talbot’s “The Pencil of Nature,” such a novelty at the time that the publishers included a note ensuring that the illustrations “[had] all been created through the effects of light, without the artist’s helping hand.” Now books of photographs are available in virtually every bookstore and online, rare editions command bubblelike prices at specialized dealers and well-attended auctions. They are the subject themselves of books, exhibitions such as this one, and a flood tide of learned articles telling us in obtuse academic jargon what it all would mean if only meaning was still a possibility.

Arley was ahead of his time.

“The Open Book” includes more than 150 books in specially designed display cases. The books were gathered by the Hasselblad Center in Sweden and come from many notable collections, including several private collections not normally accessible by the public. A majority have wall texts that not only give data about the photographer and the publication, but explain why it was thought the book was worthy of inclusion in this rough cut of a canon.

Many of the books are rare and valuable, so it is not surprising that they cannot be handled, but it is one of the ordinary pleasures of a photography book that it is held in your hands as you go through it page by page. ICP somewhat compensates for this tactile deprivation by having an enormous heap of books on a coffee table next to a comfortable sofa at the end of the exhibition, where they can be experienced properly. The books available for browsing are only in a few instances copies of ones in the exhibition, but it is the right way to conclude.

Great books are on display here. There is, for instance, a copy of John Thomson’s “Street Life of London,” from 1877, an early example of social documentary photography whose pictures could just as well be illustrations for Charles Dickens’s novels. There is “Diary of a Century” (1970), the charming book Richard Avedon edited from the enormous corpus of Jacques-Henri Lartigue’s work. There is Garry Winogrand’s “Women Are Beautiful” (1975), his bouquet to the female loveliness just walking around in plain sight on the sidewalks of major American cities. And Roy DeCarava’s “The Sweet Flypaper of Life” (1955), a tribute to the endurance of folks in Harlem, with text by Langston Hughes. There are books universally recognized as classics, like Walker Evans’s “American Photographs” (1938), with its introduction by Lincoln Kirstein in lapidary prose, and like Robert Frank’s “The Americans” (1959), with its introduction by Jack Kerouac – bloviated, narcissistic, cranked-up, Beatnik blather. The copies of these last two are first editions, but like many of the works in the show, they are still in print and readily available: You can buy them, you can own them; like Arley, you can have them on your shelves.

Individual prints usually provide the best instance of a picture, but they tend to be expensive and hard to come by. Photographs in magazines and newspapers are of lesser quality and, although inexpensive when first published, hard to find afterward and not very durable. For a price most people can afford, a well-published book presents high-quality images in a predetermined sequence, in a format that enhances their impact, and with as much text as necessary to provide a proper context. In a brilliant chapter in “Bystander: A History of Street Photography,” authors Joel Meyerowitz and Colin Westerbeck analyze the sequence of images in “The Americans,” and explain how important their order is to the impression each one makes as it appears and to their cumulative effect. An age as style-conscious as ours hardly has to be told how important the design of a book is. When all these aspects are present, as they are, for example, in Brassai’s “Paris de Nuit” (1933), a book can continue to influence new generations of photographers decades after it startled its first viewers.

“The Open Book” helps us understand how important photobooks have been in the history of photography, and by doing so, the exhibition encourages us to think about the future. The Macintosh computer on which I am typing has an application – iPhoto – that will let me produce a book of photographs with less effort than it takes to write an article. Anyone with access to a copier or printer can publish a book. Steve Hart, my teacher at ICP, chose to publish his award-winning “A Bronx Family Album” on a CD that includes not just images and text but audio components. As long as people like Arley (and me) have a passion to possess wonderful photographic art, photobooks will continue to evolve, driven by talent and the available technology.

Until September 4 (1133 Avenue of the Americas, between 43rd and 44th Streets, 212-857-0000).