Book Art

What is book art? Is it book spine poetry? Is it book folding?  What about a color coded personal library? It is all three and probably more. 

I first learned about book spine poetry in 2012 when Librarything hosted a book spine poetry contest. At the time I had over 2,000 books of my own to choose from. I still found it difficult to come up with a poem. This form of "poetry" was initially created in 1993 by Nina Katchadourian for her Sorted Books Project. She began collecting interesting titles from her own library and arranged them in piles to create a column of poetry.  

I discovered book folding when my church hosted an art project in 2014 using old hymnals. About 20 members participated. I did a basic page folding technique but others carved out parts of pages with an exacto knife to create a scene. A few members cut shapes out of the pages and put them together in a 3-D sculpture. 

My Pinterest page has several examples of how to organize your books on bookshelves so that you create a color scheme.  This one is my favorite.  However, I cannot see how a prolific reader can create this type of a scheme because we buy the books for reading purposes not the color of their spine.  A company called Books by the Foot sells books in any color scheme and on any subject. I doubt these customers are the type of readers who read for pleasure because they are only purchasing books to create a piece of art in their homes, albeit art on a bookshelf.

If you know of any additional forms of book art, please leave a comment.