Yet another use for those unwanted books
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012
Have some time on your hands? If you are determined to thin your library, contrary to our advice, here’s another way to use those unwanted books.
Guy Laramee has created two series of carved book landscapes and structures entitled Biblios and The Great Wall, where, as the website says, “the dense pages of old books are excavated to reveal serene mountains, plateaus, and ancient structures.”
Says the artist: “So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint Romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply is. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.”
See more here.
Laramee’s next show will be in April at Montreal’s Galerie d’Art d’Outremont.
Closer to home, the San Jose Public Library (of all places) has another idea, via one of its volunteers, “Debbie” at the Willow Glen neighborhood branch of the library:
“One day, Debbie came across donations no one wanted to buy: Readers’ Digest Condensed books, with beautifully decorated hard covers. She’d heard there was a way to make a purse from a book, so she did what any librarian would: research! She downloaded patterns from the Internet and created prototypes to show the Friends. Now, besides selling books, the Friends handcraft one-of-a-kind purses; each takes about 12 hours to create. Book Purses were introduced to the public at the Friends’ April, 2011, book sale. Later, a line of E-book Reader Covers was added.”
To date, “Friends of the Willow Glen Library” has sold 72 purses and e-reader covers. Frankly, we can’t think of a better use for the Readers’ Digest.
More about it here.
Salinger fan
Postscript 2/25 – Fashion Note: It’s Oscar week, and someone else has picked up the book purse theme: see here for the Michelle Williams‘s J.D. Salinger/Catcher in the Rye purse, which accessorized her Louis Vuitton suit for the Independent Spirits awards. The Oscar-nominated actress usually sports Le-Tan clutches. “The reasons for choosing Salinger’s novel are not quite as obvious, but the bag complimented the actress’s unusual attire at today’s awards,” according to the article. Be patient with the video. The book-purse comes at the end.
