
If you’ve ever worked with print materials, the chances are quite good that you’ve also found yourself surrounded by discards. The old, the out-of-date, the so-old-it’s-obsolete, the battered into uselessness: most of them will be destined for the circular file, unless someone has the energy to slide away the binding and recycle the loosened pages. Legal deskbooks and their kin outdate even faster than science books, with which I have also worked; they leave us with a lot of books ready to go out…and also a lot of books to use, if we feel like it, for impromptu art projects.
I’ve worked in public and academic libraries (and have collected for science!), so I’ve handled a lot of discards. Deskbooks are a little different than the average scholarly or popular publication: their pages are a whole lot thinner, and many are softcover, both of which will influence how they can be repurposed: you’re not likely, when working with a deskbook, to be able to whip out a saw and turn it into a sculpture, for instance, and the pages are so thin that they won’t work terribly well as cutouts. But there are a lot of different ways to create book art–and, as it happens, newsprint-thin pages are pretty great at rolling.
You’ll find, if you look, plenty of instructions for book folding or rolling or cutting, a wide selection of the things we can do with outdated books that might otherwise go into the landfill (unless, of course, we take the time to remove pages from bindings so they can be recycled). You won’t need much in the way of instruction for page rolling, however: you’ll only need your own eye. How thick do you want those pages? Do you want parts of your former deskbook-turned-paper seashell to be thicker, or thinner? Discards bring plenty of chances to figure out just how you like those rolled pages.
As for whether they’ll take color: stay tuned! One of these days I’ll add paint and modpodge.
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