Why should out-of-date, unwanted books molder away in the dark corners of libraries, or – far worse – in a landfill? Artists working with books, whether they make it their sole chosen medium or just experiment once in a while, rescue these bound volumes of art and information and fold, cut, carve, glue, assemble or otherwise transform them into amazing sculptures and installations that honor or often transcend the meaning held within the pages.

Jill Sylvia

(images via: jillysylvia.com)

Jill Sylvia meticulously removes the blank entry blocks in ledger books and balance sheets, leaving behind nothing but delicate paper mesh. These geometric skeletons are then used to build amazing replicas of famous buildings like the U.S. Capitol and the White House.

Julia Feld

(images via: holystokes)

Favoring anatomy books, wildlife guides and instruction manuals, artist Julia Feld selectively removes parts of pages to leave behind layered collages, often left within the hardcover to resemble shadow boxes. She sells these intricate works at her Etsy shop, Holy Stokes.

Noriko Ambe

(images via: norikoambe.com)

Multidimensional and lush, the cut-outs by Noriko Ambe almost seem to have occurred simultaneously as part of some strange natural process.  Says Ambe, “Time is essential to my work. Because over time I add more and more paper to a sculpture, the work itself ends up embodying the time taken to create it. The process is as important as the finished product and the simple act of making art every day is important to my practice. Buddhism, although it’s not my intention to show this.”

Bronia Sawyer

(images via: broniart)

Birds, flowers, the waves of the ocean – all of these things and more are evoked simply by curling, folding and coloring the pages of books. Bronia Sawyer creates little paper worlds in which these animals seem to frolic and thrive. “A book is a magical thing, to look at a page of text at a glance gives no clue about its content, but to read the words brings a story to life, it opens your imagination’s floodgates and creates an invisible world in your mind which only you can see.”

Meg Hitchcock

(images via: meghitchcock.com)

Cutting words out of religious texts including the Bible, Koran and Torah, Brooklyn-based artist Meg Hitchcock creates these incredible collages “deconstructing the word of God.” Says Hitchcock, “I select passages from holy books and cut the letters from one passage to form the text of another. For example, I may cut up a passage from the Old Testament of the Bible and reassemble it as a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, or I may use type from the Torah to recreate an ancient Tantric text. A continuous line of text forms the words and sentences in a run-on manner, without spaces or punctuation, creating a visual mantra of devotion.”

Ariana Boussard-Reifel

(images via: arianaboussardreifel.com)

In her series ‘Between the Lines’, artist Ariana Boussard-Reifel has cut each and every word out of the pages of books, leaving behind only the white space, creating patterns that render the books meaningless – or do they?

Maria Fischer

(images via: maria-fischer.com)

Traumgedanken (Thoughts on Dreams) is a 76-page collection of literary, philosophical, psychological and scientific texts which provide insight into dream theories. Amazingly, German artist Maria Fischer has hand-sewn the pages with threads that tie images to certain keywords as sort of physical hyperlinks, which, Fischer says, visualize the confusion and fragility of dreams.

The artist explains, “In addition there are five pages where a significant excerpt from a text of the opposite page is stitched into the paper. It is not legible because the type’s actual surface is inside the folded page. This expresses the mysteriousness of dreams and the aspect of dream interpretation.”

Michael Bom

(images via: bomdesign.nl)

Designer Michael Bom turns books of all sorts into stunningly artistic lamps that retain the character of the book’s content. Some are simply opened, with the pages carefully spaced apart, to act as wall lamps; others are carefully cut and crafted to provide a variety of shapes. Between the pages a viewer can just barely glimpse images and text, which create interesting patterns of dark and light on the lantern surface.

Ann Hamilton

(images via: this is colossal)

Multimedia artist Ann Hamilton has occasionally worked with books throughout her 20-year career including projects in which she connected slices of books at the spine to form shapes as well as large-scale installations of stacked books. The installations form dense towers that, by virtue of the varying thicknesses of the books, take on a painterly quality when viewed from afar.

Alex Queral

(images via: projectsgallery.com)

Alex Queral carves faces into books of faceless names, producing three-dimensional portraits that reach deep within discarded phone books. Most are famous faces like PeeWee Herman and Bob Dylan; some are realistic, while others are crafted in an abstracted style. Queral uses an X-ACTO knife and a pot of acrylic medium to carve and set the books, and then applies a black wash to bring out the features.

Cara Barer

(images via: carabarer.com)

Sculptor Cara Barer bends, folds and curls the pages of unwanted books, sometimes coloring their edges, molding them into forms that suggest organic life like birds, insects and even the undersides of mushrooms. Says Barer, “With the discarded books that I have acquired, I am attempting to blur the line between objects, sculpture, and photography. This project has become a journey that continues to evolve.”

Yvette Hawkins

(images via: bookliciousblog)

From small folded paper pieces to installations of thousands of books that fill entire rooms, the art of Yvette Hawkins is inspired by forms in architecture, grids, maps and molecules as well as the geometric forms found in nature.

“The thing I love about paper is the idea that something so fragile and one dimensional can become structured and sturdy just by folding it. I actually started folding books because I wanted to manipulate the way printed words can be seen, so although i have always loved to work with paper, it was mark making and print that drew me to books.”

The meaning of a book goes far beyond mere printed words. Books are symbols – for knowledge, fantasy, curiosity and so many other things – and even in an increasingly digital world where many books are only available in electronic format, these collections of bound pages maintain their hold upon our collective psyche. Perhaps that’s why they make such a startlingly unexpected and emotive medium for art of all kinds, from towering art installations to delicate paper sculptures. These 12 works of book art and architecture transcend the messages contained in the pages, both celebrating the books’ intrinsic value and tearing it down to convey something new.

A Building Made of Books

(images via: psfk)

This incredible tower of books is real – but it’s not exactly what you think. Built by artist Matej Kren, who previously built a similar book building in Prague, “Scanner” was a walk-through exhibit wherein the visitor enters a seemingly infinite tunnel with books that go on and on. It was, indeed, created with thousands of books, but mirrors enhance the effect.

“Mirrors become an instrument to create illusion and, at the same time, to unmask it. Since the public can easily see themselves reflected in a false infinite – thus discovering the illusion – the problem becomes the latency of perception.”

Tree of Codes

(images via: designboom)

A work of both art and literature, and a commentary on the limitations of digital publishing, Jonathon Safran Foer’s book Tree of Codes relishes the physicality of paper and the ways in which it can be manipulated for enhanced value. Each page is die-cut to reveal only certain words – taken from The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz – in a printing technique that reveals a message in patterns. The concept was rejected by one printer after another before Belgium’s Die Keure agreed to take it on. Does this work defy translation into digital reading devices? Some say the effect could be reproduced using Flash, but it just wouldn’t be the same.

Robert The: Book Works

(images via: bookdust.com)

Artist and mathematician Robert The got his start working with books after a brief, unexplained period in which he was left unable to read cultivated a new appreciation for letters as symbols, and all of the information and emotion they are able to convey. Rescuing discarded books from dumpsters, The began cutting them into shapes (including his well-known book guns), sometimes interlocking them into puzzling sculptures.

Mike Stilkey’s Painted Book Sculptures

(images via: daily art fixx)

The melancholy characters of artist Mike Stilkey are even more captivating when they stand seven feet tall, painted onto an installation of 5,000 books. Stilkey’s paintings on individual book pages gradually morphed into painting down the spines of stacked books. Like so many other book artists, Stilkey finds inspiration in the imagined lives of the books’ former owners. “I’m always interested in the notes or messages left in the books by people who used to own them.  I would look for discarded or forgotten items left in the books. One time I found two unused plane tickets to New York from 1967.”

Su Blackwell’s Delicate Trees

(images via: booklicious)

Artist Su Blackwell coaxes life from the pages of a book, not through vivid descriptions but through very precise cuts. “Paper has been used for communication since its invention; either between humans or in an attempt to communicate with the spirit world. I employ this delicate, accessible medium and use irreversible, destructive processes to reflect on the precariousness of the world we inhabit and the fragility of our life, dreams and ambitions.”

Tom Bendtsen Book Installations

(images via: tombendtsen.com)

Each of Tom Bendtsen’s book sculptures in his ‘Arguments’ series is made of at least 10,000 books, and, he says, “sought to reflect the fragility of arguments, which are mostly inflexible in a history that is fluid.” While some earlier work considered the text of the books – getting more and more superficial as the tower gets higher – his more recent towers are concerned with color and form, using the books like pixels.

What Have We Become? By Nicholas Galanin

(images via: galanin flickr)

Trained in both ‘traditional’ and contemporary approaches to art, Alaskan native Nicholas Galanin uses the unusual medium of books to explore and celebrate his Aleut/Tlingit heritage in the series “What Have We Become?” Galanin redefines the term ‘native art’ to fit into the modern world, sculpting three-dimensional human faces out of a book that tells the tale of his people, Under Mount Saint Elias. “.The complexities of cultural growth and interaction create preconceived ideals, perspectives and viewpoints. Through action and creative risk taking, I, as an artist am able to partake in this cultural development.”

Jacqueline Rush Lee

(images via: jaquelinerushlee.com)

To artist Jacqueline Rush Lee, there’s nothing inspiring about blank canvas. She desires meaning in the medium itself – making books the ideal material to shape, alter and sometimes destroy. But don’t be too quick to criticize this type of book art for destroying perfectly good books, she argues: the books are being given new life.

“I am drawn to the aesthetic of a hand-worn book?say the way that a book has been taped lovingly together, or one that speaks of someone having handled it for a very long time as a precious object. I am also attracted to the marginalia in books and how there is this whole other intimacy and world within books that go beyond the story and the work of the original author. And then, you know, you see that these intimate precious objects are then dumped at a used library space and you wonder about the lives of who these people were who had owned the books.”

Light Reading by Lucy Norman

(images via: lucynorman)

Did you know that thousands of books are unsold even when offered for mere pennies or even free? These unwanted books end up in the landfill, because there’s currently no infrastructure to recycle the paper, which is low-grade and edged in glue. Lucy Norman turns such rejected books into beautiful chandeliers that are equal parts art and décor, making them beautiful to look at even if their words can no longer be read.

Biografias by Alicia Martin

(images via: visual therapy)

The stories of five thousand lives are twisted into a whirlwind and thrown out windows in Biografias, an installation in Cordoba, Spain by artist Alicia Martin. It’s as if the books have become living entities in themselves, joining together into a monstrous creation that demands notice and attention. “No longer shut away in libraries or reduced to a furnishing accessory, the books/work of this artist turn into a shapeless incumbent concretion that tenaciously clings to the walls of the gallery and seems to elude the laws of gravity,” says the curator at Galleria Galica.

Veronica Salazar: Book of Art

(images via: graffart)

Millions of words contained within the books that form the basis of Veronica Salazar’s art are either condensed into a single word or discarded altogether in favor of a new message. The pages are precisely folded to reveal messages that the artist considers inspirational, like ‘Read’ and ‘Dream’. “I see my work as a way to display a meaningful piece of art onto a book that would otherwise sit on a shelf and collect dust; it’s also my way of recycling a book that might otherwise end up in a landfill,” she says.

Building Made of 7,000 Phone Books

(images via: inhabitat)

Using books of a different sort – antiquated volumes filled with phone numbers – architect Richard Kroeker and a team of students from the Dalhousie University Department of Architecture in Nova Scotia created a building not for art, but rather as an experiment in adaptability. Even if production stopped today, millions of phone books are still in existence around the world – what are we going to do with them all? In this case, 7,000 books were stacked in columns reinforced with metal and covered in a basket weave facade. The books are so dense that wood can be screwed directly into them.