Mark Twain said,
“The man who does not read good books has no advantage
over the man who can’t read them.”
I wonder what he would say about doing this with books:
The New Yorker Book Bench blog posted this picture and a writeup about Isaac Salazar, the artist who created this sculpture by folding and cutting a book.
Looking through a gallery of his work on booooooom.com, I’m amazed and inspired by his creativity and skill. I once managed a used bookstore (second best job in the world) where thousands of books were discarded every year. We donated as many books as we could and sent the unwanted ones to recycling, but not all books meet such an eco-friendly end. A lot of them end up at the dump. This artist is doing his part to keep old books in circulation and out of the landfills. As a lover of books and book arts, seeing a book turned into a piece of art as beautiful as this, just makes me happy.
To read more, visit Page-Turner.
Away with Words 
love it!
Fantastic! Thank you Olivia
Just fantastic. Truly inspiring. I hope you won’t mind if I attach Salazar’s fantastic site to my blog as well. I get such good thoughts from your site. It keeps my fingers flying on the keyboard – flying may be optimistic, but certainly fluttering.
I love this will link it too! Love art and books and the “read” one. Thanks.
Olivia, have you seen Brian Dettmer’s work? He also carves up books. You can see some examples at http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/05/100-extraordinary-examples-of-paper-art/
Scroll part way down the page to see his work, but I think you’ll get a kick out of everything on the page, if you haven’t seen it before.
-Jen 🙂
Also check out Jonathan Safran Foer’s project, “Tree of Codes.” He takes one of his favorite books and carves out the majority of it in order to create an entirely new story. Watch the video below: