theartofgooglebooks:

The author becomes a text: pasted-in portrait, clipped from a newspaper. 

From the front matter of The Purgatory of Suicides: A Prison-Rhyme by Thomas Cooper (1850). Original from the University of Michigan. Digitized March 6, 2006.

Look at that face!

finkymadethis:

I folded this on Sunday morning, listening to a Buddhist podcast. It’s Light in August, and I loved every page.

Something about this folding pattern seems fitting—it reminds me of Joe Christmas’s apotheosis-in-death! (Yes, I was an English major.)

skylightbooks:

Eric Yahnker: 99 Rises/100 Falls, 2008, 99 Books with “The Rise and Fall of…” in title, dimensions variable 

I wonder about the history of the phrase “Rise and Fall.” I always misremember Gibbon’s mammoth Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as the Rise and Fall, which it most certain isn’t (it’d be 12 brick-sized volumes instead of six).

According to Google Ngram, the use of the phrase “Rise and Fall” just started picking up after 1800 before skyrocketing in (relative) popularity in the late 20th century. Since then, the phrase, it seems, has already begun its decline.

From Colossal:

UK-based artist Kyle Kirkpatrick constructs these wonderfully tiny dioramas using the topographies of carved books. Via the artist:

“My practice is primarily concerned with the notion of the imagined landscape. I present man-made objects and natural materials simultaneously to form carefully and meticulously composed installation works. I capitalize on intrigue taking objects out of context reinventing their use, pushing the viewer to see beyond what I present before them, a glass could be interpreted as a lake or a metal bracket a cliff.”

unconsumption:

Honolulu public library books that have been taken out of circulation get folded into art by Wendy Kawabata.  

Pictured: Part of Wendy’s Withdrawn from Circulation installation in New Zealand. 

(Spotted on Poppytalk)

Note: Unconsumption caveat on using books as raw material. Also: Find some previous posts on new uses for old books here.