The other day I was trolling some neighborhood thrift stores in the hopes of finding a taffeta bridesmaid dress, because, well, when you write a book with a name like Terror in Taffeta, you start to get some funny ideas in your head.
Anyway, St. Vincent De Paul’s had created an—I don’t know what you’d call it. Art installation? Wall collage? Fire hazard?—using a bunch of old books attached to a wall. I snapped a picture so I could add it to my list of projects that I totally mean to do but won’t ever get around to doing.
Then, the next day, I ran across a picture of a tunnel built out of books at The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles—part of the upstairs labyrinth where you can pick up several thousand books for a dollar apiece. A book entitled Genius caught my eye, and I immediately started thinking, “What if you’re the dude who wrote that book and you see your book there, just another brick in the tunnel?” The hours he must have spent writing it! The hopes and dreams!
With my debut novel less than one month old, I can’t help but think about what will become of it a year from now, ten years, twenty. Will I see copies of it in a thrift store? Will it be part of a book tunnel somewhere? Will a copy be used to prop up furniture, like I discovered some poor book doing under the bed on my last vacation? (To make matters worse, they’d torn the cover off to make it just the right height.)
I took a class once called Altered Books, in which we took old books and turned them into—well, I was going to say works of art, but our attempts were more like feeble craft projects. Some people in the class felt squeamish about cutting, painting and bedazzling otherwise perfectly respectable books. But I loved the idea of turning an old, discarded book into something new and giving it a new purpose in life.
And I still do, even now that one of those future discarded books may be my own.
If I could choose a second chapter for my first editions, I think being turned into a circulation desk at a library would be a noble cause, like this amazing piece of literary furniture that welcomes patrons to the Delft Library of Architecture:
It would be an honor to find my book incorporated into one of these amazing collages by Ekaterina Panikanova:
Or part of the Flying Bookcase at The Last Bookstore:
Or even used as a sketchpad, like this:
Art begets art. Nothing lasts forever. And inspiration can come from just about anywhere.
Marla Cooper is the author of Terror in Taffeta, a humorous mystery the author hopes will never be used to prop up a bed. Unless it makes the bed more stable and ends up saving someone’s life. In which case she guesses that’s okay. Learn more at www.marla-cooper.com.
Chicks on the Case 
Those are cool.
My parents have two outdated sets of encyclopedias that I’ve love to do use as table legs on a coffee table or desk.
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Ahhh, encyclopedias. Bless their hearts. Outdated reference books are just begging to be put to new use!
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Amazing post, Marla!!! What beautiful ways to honor old books’ past and present lives. Hopefully all that shellac or whatever won’t destroy that old-book smell!
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Thanks, Lisa! There is something about the smell of old books, isn’t there?
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Gorgeous, moving post!
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Thanks, Ellen! 🙂
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I love this post! I’m going to share it to librarians I know.
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Thanks for sharing, and thanks for stopping by!
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Nice post and cool images, Marla! I’d like to think my own book might one day become part of an art installation or library desk! I’d much prefer that to having words cut out of it for a ransom note 😀
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Ha, yes! That’s a *really* good point! 🙂
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Every time I go into one of our local libraries, I say a little prayer, “Please, God, don’t let one of my books be on the 25¢ discard cart.” But when books are discarded, you give us a lovely reminder that they can live beautiful lives again. I love all the photos that accompany your post- wonderful ideas.
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“Please, God, don’t let one of my books be on the 25¢ discard cart.” … Seriously!
May all our books be well loved and continue on in surprising ways!
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I’d be happy to see my books circulating for eternity in some form. Not that I’d know about the eternal part 😉
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I know, it’s kind of a nice thought, right? Someone finding our “vintage” tomes 100 years from now?
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This is such a great way to be keep one’s memory alive!
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Not enough coffee, yet! “To keep one’s memory alive.”
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“Not enough coffee yet” — me, neither! It read perfectly fine to me! 🙂
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