15 Books Destroyed for Art

Lovers of print books love to talk about the shortcomings of eBooks. Print books, they say, have a comforting weight, they smell nice, and, really, what else are you going to put on your bookshelf? Some artists have taken the idea of books-as-decoration to a beautiful new level — although they’ve destroyed those books in the process (hopefully there’s a digital edition safe on someone’s server).

In honor of the recent return of Scotland’s beloved and elusive book sculptor, whose allegedly final anonymous sculpture was discovered in late 2011, here’s a gallery of artwork created from books:

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— Benjamin Samuel is the Co-Editor of Electric Literature. He was briefly a book street artist when a teacher told him that doodling in the margins of his textbook was “destruction of property.” Find him on Twitter.