Most of us have books in our homes. I know that because tons of them keep turning up at auctions. I don’t believe I’ve been to a single auction that hasn’t had a stack of books on the tables or cardboard boxes of them on the floor.
They’re comforting to us, whether we have them on shelves for reading or just accumulating, or we have deliberately collected them. I buy specific books for myself and children’s book to donate to an elementary school library project.
I don’t fancily incorporate books into my decor at home. Most are lined up on shelves, and a few are laid flat on their backs – not to prop up some family photo or knickknack but because I’ve run out of space.
At several auctions recently, I spotted stacks of what looked like books with scholarly titles sitting atop some furniture. The books were gigantic, like those old family Bibles that also appear quite often at auction. When I touched one stack, it slid easily away from me. With its size, that didn’t make sense.
Then I realized that I was not looking at individual books but a hollow case with spines that were actually pull-out drawers. The pretend books were painted in dark reds, blues and greens with gold-leaf lettering and page edges.
Later, I found even more of them at a second auction; some were floor-model, about half my height, along with coffeetables. They had such titles as “Ivanhoe,” by (Sir) Walter Scott, “Kamouraska” by Anne Hebert and “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville.
I’d never seen books used in this way as furniture. In Googling, I kept coming across the name Hemingway attached to a library side table similar to the furniture at auction. I suppose it was based on the writer’s extensive library of 9,000 books, which are in his former home – now a museum – in Havana, Cuba.
The book furniture at auction was a bit too dense and dark for me. Maybe it would go well in a home library with heavy mahogany shelves, desks and chairs. But I’d sooner go with the light, airy and stylish pieces I saw on the web, like the ones that this artist made into accessories. I found several sites with interestingly different sculptural pieces made with books.
Craftspeople apparently are also re-constructing books into works of art, including sculptures (Brian Detmer), jewelry (Jeremy May), mobiles (Lisa Occhipinti) and spools of thread (Susan Porteous), according to this cincinnati.com article. The works are beautiful, but it chills me to tear apart books.
Once, I came across prints that had been torn from an 1890 book on birds of Pennsylvania. The original owner had probably planned to sell them individually. I still have them.
At auction, buyers snatch up books by the dozens, and I have always wondered how many they actually sold and what they did with the rest. I don’t buy many anymore because I have only so much space. But finding an artistic way to keep them out of landfills is a good way to give them a new life.
Don’t you think?
