Once again, the New York Public Library has brought us one of the city’s best museum shows outside a museum. “French Book Art: Artists and Poets in Dialogue,” which opens tomorrow, includes collaborative books by Malraux and Leger, Eluard and Picasso, Apollinaire and Dufy, Breton and Giacometti, as well as works by Chagall, de Chirico, Derain, Matisse, Man Ray, and Masson. A bibliophile’s dream, the exhibition is a veritable wonderland tour of some of the most beautiful and pioneering collaborative books made between poets and artists during the last 125 years.

Curated by Yves Peyre, director of the Bibliotheque litteraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, “French Book Art” draws mainly from the collections of the Bibliotheque and the New York Public Library. The show comprises 126 books created in France between 1874 and 1999, many of which are accompanied by counterpoints, original works of art relating to or contrasting with the books. Beginning with French Impressionism, the exhibition opens with collaborative works between two revolutionaries: the artist Edouard Manet and the poet Stephane Mallarme.

The show’s thesis is that the radical “book of dialogue” – that of mutual creativity between author and artist, image and text – began with Poe’s “The Raven” (1875), which was translated by Mallarme and illustrated by Manet. This seems a little too pat. Although their collaborations certainly had an impact on many other artists, this French point of departure is a little misleading, considering that the poet William Blake’s visionary work from the late 18th century (not to mention that of the mutual interchange between illustrators and scribes working in ancient Egypt, in medieval monasteries, and on Asian prints and scrolls) not only put equal emphasis on image and text, but was inspiring to French poets and artists.

The show has a few other minor flaws worth mentioning: The installation is over-designed, and the books are aesthetically uneven, especially after 1970, when their quality falls off considerably. “French Book Art” also devotes ancillary sections to academic sculptures and numerous photographic portraits (some great but most not) of the poets and artists whose works are on view. That said, the exhibition, flaws and all, is stunning as art, literature, graphic design, and historical artifact.

Included here is “The Prose of the Transsiberian and of Little Jeannie of France” (1913). One of the most innovative masterpieces of 20th-century book design, “The Prose of the Transsiberian” is the second collaborative work between the poet Blaise Cendrars and the painter Sonia Delaunay. Delaunay, along with her husband Robert, was one of the founders of 20th-century European abstraction. Cendrars, a man built equally out of fact and fiction, was a vagabond and one of the first truly self-invented personalities of the modern era – a time in which everything, including the book form, was to be called into question and rethought.

“The Prose of the Transsiberian,” a long, Proustian poem, evokes images, memories, and experiences during a train ride with a Parisian prostitute, from Moscow to the Sea of Japan. It is in this book – an accordion-style scroll 6 1/2 feet long – that abstract color, a Michelin map, and the poem, in 12 various-sized and colored typefaces, all interact fluidly and harmonically. It is here, for the first time in modern book design, that hierarchy, time, and the separation between illustration and text are all truly dissolved into pure music. It is here that, for the first time since the Medieval manuscript, image and word are abstractly fused and emotionally equivalent; and in the library’s exhibition, it is here that I first sense something revolutionary.

Cendrars and Delaunay’s innovations reverberate throughout the show, even in works – such as “Manhattan Sixties” (1991), by Michel Butor and Bertrand Dorny – that ultimately fail. And their influence can be felt especially in the numerous illustrations by Miro and in masterpieces such as Eluard and Leger’s jumbling parade of word and color, “Liberty, I Write Your Name” (1953), and in the Dadaist collaboration between Tristan Tzara and Jean Arp “Twenty-Five Poems” (1918), in which the forms of Arp’s abstractions take on the dual role of image and word experienced in Chinese calligraphy or Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Despite the exhibition’s ups and downs (works by overrated talents such as Dubuffet, Ernst, Picabia, and Jasper Johns feel obligatory), “French Book Art” is alive, fresh, varied, and full of surprises. Filled with masterpieces in writing, binding, typography, and illustration, the exhibition is as playful as it is sophisticated – a beautiful marriage between image and word.

From May 5 until August 19 (Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, 212-930-0587).