“Nicholas Jones is a Melbourne based sculptor who uses books and printed paper to make works which question the manner in which books are ‘read’.
Books are capsules; vessels designed to hold information, borne of investigation or of personal expression. These objects are often venerated, held aloft as are amulets, as the source of reasoned knowledge, the fecund field awaiting the harvest. Sequestered away in dusty libraries, spines anticipating the eye of the beholder, these books tactility remains at arms length.
The physical act of folding, tearing and sewing book leaves, may be considered iconoclastic (extinguishing the fire of reason, perhaps). Although sometimes iconised for their content or historical importance, more often than not, books are discarded as cultural detritus. These transformed books aim to highlight the poetic nature of the book as form. As historical phenomena, books have reflected the evolution of mankind, and although beseiged by new technologies, the book remains steadfastly both the solver of the riddle and the creator of the labyrinth.”
via poetbabble:
Tying into Nabokov’s love of lepidoptery, I asked twenty different designers to design specimen boxes for the twenty different books. The only restrictions were that one had to use paper and pins to illustrate the title.— John Gall, The Nabokov Project.
Clockwise from upper left: Stephen Doyle, Yentus and Booher, Carin Goldberg, and Michael Bierut.
Photographs by Allison Gootee.
John Gall has the way cool (and continuing) story of the cover design for Remainder, one of the better books I’ve read this year. This has so many layers of meta, I don’t know where to even begin.
Aqua U. presents a Pocket Book Mini Album Workshop with FreckledNest.com’s Leigh-Ann Keffer, this Saturday October 17 (10am-4pm, $44).
I’ll tell you how I started all this. I was once on a train going to Philadelphia reading a biography of Nixon, and I started scratching it out as I read it, and by the time I got to Philadelphia I had scratched the whole book out. After that I started nailing books shut and tying them up.
libraryland:stevenbrisson: Sculpture in a state of flux. Sculptor and photographer Cara Barer creates contemporary & intricate designs in conceptual paper modular folding, then takes elegant photos of the water-soaked discarded books.
The stage at Austrian Bregenzer Festspiele’s 1999 production of Verdi’ s opera “A Masked Ball” was a giant book being read by a skeleton . (I had to dig for this because the original poster just put up the image with no context. Shame on your laziness.)
This is a lovely artsy book pic (but it’s nice when the original poster can credit it/link to the artist/photographer).
(via uprisinglilia)
