Jeff Peachey's bookbinding blog is a fantastic way to spend a while. His latest post comments upon the above window installation in New York, where books have been opened, wet, and rolled into trunk-like configurations (which, looking at them again are probably more likely to be an arrangement of blowsy roses, which fits the kind of shop it's decorating). I like Jeff's air of offence and the reasons for it; I'm more ambivalent, but probably would have preferred this to be in a more 'intellectual' spot than just decorating a shopfront. I'd like to hear from the designer, and how much they'd thought it through. Still, it stirs my altered book juices.
Another fabulous read on Jeff's blog is his page on treating a part of a Gutenberg Bible. The irony of someone hand-writing part of a printed document that was meant to be counterfeiting a hand-written document is delicious.
Postscript, about a week later: I seriously like JP -- blindfolded bookbinding! Crazy.
2 comments:
There might be something a little Charles Rennie Mac about those roses... Beautiful.
There's a series of bookstores around Melbourne that have desks set up on what appear to be stacks of books. I think it's all a facade - or at least I like to think that, because the alternative (those are actual, readable books consigned to be the legs/walls of desks) is horrible. Another possibility that strikes me when I see those desks is that somebody, at some time, has actually gone about systematically gutting the pages out of books to make them fit around the desk. Horrible!
Then there's that small business who sell 'diaries' to Readings and at Zine fairs - they take old books, remove the pages from them, and replace them with blank paper, with spiral binding. (I think their policy is to only do this to old and damaged books.)
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