Artist's books are often presented under a glass vitrine, open to a single page with the rest of the story left a mystery. But at BCA Center in Burlington, printmaker Jane Kent's solo show of such works — cheekily titled "Between the Covers" — contains only one project in the form of a book. The rest are on loose pages hung on the walls. Kent, who lives in Burlington and New York City and has taught at the University of Vermont for the past 20 years, chose the format deliberately. As she noted in a recent BCA discussion with poet Major Jackson, artist's books are "not reasonable. They're hard to see, hard to sell, hard to show." Her works "were made to be on the wall for that very reason," she said. That makes viewing "Between the Covers" particularly gratifying. Kent's artist's books are collaborations with major American authors — Jackson as well as Richard Ford, Susan Orlean, Joyce Carol Oates and the lesser-known Dorothea Grossman — whose writing is itself a draw. For instance, viewers can read Ford's 1996 short story "Privacy" in its entirety in Kent's work of the same title. Yet in Kent's books those words participate in a deeply considered dance between printed language and visual art to create something new. Kent doesn't illustrate, as she often points out; she creates prints in which word and image figure equally. In 1994, Kent set herself the task of completing 10 word-and-image projects, using a variety of print methods, in collaboration with alternating male and female authors. The BCA show includes the six she has so far created (most printed in editions of 35), along with an array of working drawings and individual prints. The copies on display are from UVM's Special Collections Library; other editions are held by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the New York Public Library, and Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Twenty-four years elapsed between the completion of Kent's first artist's book, "Privacy," and the latest, Oates' poem "Little Albert, 1920." Kent considers, rereads and experiments with each text for years before arriving at the right marriage between her contributions and the author's. "Privacy," for instance, took five years. Ford, whom Kent got to know while they both taught at Princeton University, handed her the still-unpublished manuscript…