Creative uses for books

This may or may not portend something about the future of the form in which long chunks of text are published. But what about the future of the long chunks of text that have already been published as physical objects with paper pages bound between covers? There are, after all, many such things around. Set aside any emotional attachment you may feel toward the reading of physical books; the truth is that creative uses for books that do not involve engaging with words on a page already abound.

For starters, books have served as useful raw material for conversion into an impressive variety of artworks. Jacqueline Rush Lee has created a body of work that turns books into organic-looking shapes - sometimes pages are rolled, sometimes they seem to grow from their open covers, sometimes they’re squashed into wholly different forms.

Su Blackwell’s intricate cutouts rise from old books like impossible pop-ups; Stephen Doyle has made tanks and staircases from paper pages, resting on open books that serve as pedestals. Guy Laramee and Brian Dettmer have each created compelling three-dimensional objects by carving or otherwise restructuring books.

Thomas Allen has made vivid images of figures rising from lurid pulp paperbacks. Photographers like Paul Octavious, Victor Shrager and Abelardo Morell, among others, have made pictures that linger over book details, or rearrange book groups, in memorable ways.

Some old books are converted to more functional uses. Inhabitat.com specifically cited e-reader-fuelled “book extinction” when praising the work of a designer making used books into planters. Not long ago I read an online tutorial for using the pages of “cheap paperback books at the thrift store” to make what amounted to wallpaper. (“You don’t necessary [sic] need old antique books, just books with pages with a yellow tint.”) Jim Rosenau’s work is my favorite example: among his more cunning creations are bookshelves and bookcases constructed out of books.

Rosenau has cited, as partial inspiration, Nicholson Baker’s insightful, and still-relevant, 1995 New Yorker essay, “Books as Furniture.” That article started out by considering the way books functioned as props in mail-order catalogues and went on to deliver a thorough history of book display. Unlike other collectibles, books “represent a different order of plenitude,” Baker observed, one that encompasses, “the camel caravans of thought-bearing time to read them through.”

Maybe an e-reader signals the same thing. Maybe it doesn't. But even if books become unnecessary to imply a surplus of mind-leisure time, they are now functioning like catalog props in real life.

For $29, Restoration Hardware will sell you an antiqued uncovered book bundle. What appears to be a cubic page clump is described this way: “Liberated from their covers, stitched and bound with jute twine, the foxed and faded pages of old books become objets d’art.” Various small merchants on Etsy.com aren’t so fancy about making the same argument. One called Adoption Agency offers a “retro book stack” - i.e., four old books - for $14. Another bundle of books from the seller Sadie Olive goes for $42: “Fragile and worn, these books make lovely props,” reads the blunt pitch. Sadie Olive earlier sold a set of three old books evidently meant to be judged solely by their covers, which were united “in the taupe family.”

“Our working notion of what books look like,” Baker wrote in his 1995 essay, “is on the verge of becoming frozen in a brownish fantasy phase that may estrange us from, and therefore weaken our resolve to read, the books we actually own.” Perhaps. Certainly it’s relevant that most of these examples involve older volumes: whether it’s because of changing production standards or changing tastes, most contemporary mass-market books simply aren’t as appealing, as physical objects, as their “vintage” predecessors. As pure decoration, a shelf of 19th-century tomes just looks more interesting than a typical shelf of, say, recent nonfiction at Barnes & Noble.

But it turns out that clever people have found uses for the most unremarkable texts. For example, last year another Etsy seller, Busted Typewriter, had an interesting listing: “Love your Kindle but miss the feel of holding a real book?” it asked. “Then I bet you’ll enjoy carrying your Kindle hidden inside a book. This hardcover copy of ‘Buying In’ by Rob Walker has been sealed and cut by hand to fit Amazon’s Kindle 6 Wireless Reading Device.” Pictures confirmed that the book - along with plenty of others - had been destroyed in a manner that made it a convenient Kindle disguiser, and somebody (not me!) bought this thing for $25. At the time I had mixed feelings, but looking back, I realise I should probably be pleased to know that I was, in a sense, on the cutting edge of the future of books.