Books turned into music boxes
Artist Jennifer Khoshbin makes beautiful music boxes out of old books -- a new collection of works are on display at Rose and Radish, in San Francisco.
Music Books: Place ear to book, turn crank and listen (via Cribcandy)
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Why destroy perfectly good books when bibles are ten a penny?
I may be an old fuddy duddy, but I hate it when people do this. Those books are beautiful works of art, and they should be preserved! Making them into music boxes ruins them.
I'm reminded of an article I saw on the net a long time ago, about a guy who had modified a cold-war era Geiger counter (that looked awesome, it was that old school industrial Soviet-style design) into an iPod-case. WTF? You don't ruin awesome historical artifacts like that! Especially books.
I'm all for building neat little steampunk machines, but can we please try and preserve some of the really cool stuff from the past?
Also, kids, get off my lawn!
Yeah, I know! Those look like books that would actually be worth reading
Now, the stuff that pretentious clubs (and sometimes individuals) use to stuff their bookshelves - Reader's Digest Condensed Nonsense, obsolete and ostentatiously bound legal decision references - there would be no great harm in gutting those.
Now that I think of it - I wonder where I could get a couple of obsolete, ostentatiously bound, legal reference books for a project I have in mind...
#3: Maybe try dumpster-diving (or checking with the staff) at legal libraries (at law schools in particular). The volume of stuff that gets outdated and tossed can be pretty staggering sometimes. Also, maybe check legal bookstores or with law students for outdated case books. Those are often bound ostentatiously, and new editions come out almost every year.
Re the bottom-right book--the music box in that better be playing Peter Bjorn and John. Otherwise that song will have been stuck in my head for the rest of the day for nothing.
Just have the book appraised before doing something extreme with it. First editions can be pretty valuable on their own. I don't know about the other titles but Jack London and John Ruskin are pretty collectable.
Great example of judging a book by its cover. Perhaps the message here is that we've reached the tipping point of illiteracy- books are so irrelevant to us, we feel free turn them into toys for the amusement of children. Fahrenheit 451 was wrong. We won't burn books, we'll forget what they are for.
I'm not sure of that particular edition, but The King of the Golden River may contain illustrations by Arthur Rackham. If so, cutting up that book is criminal.
amazing how often this comes up here. BB should have a condemned book recyler's address on the header. Don't worry so much folks, they hardly ever trash a Gutenberg Bible to make a tissue caddy.
Destroying one of the Young Folks' Treasury series is a shame. I loved the illustrations in these books. Check out the pillowfight photo opposite page 32 of volume 10, "Ideal Home Life":
http://www.archive.org/stream/youngfolkstreasu10mabirich
The endpapers are beautiful too.
#8 THANKS for that link...I have never seen it before and it is amazing.
Not sure what message this gives children? I was taught to respect books, not to gut them for ornaments and toys.
You, who respond with 'respect books' or 'why RUIN books?' are seriously overanalyzing this, and also perpetuating the silliest logical fallacy: the 'slippery slope' argument.
There are hundreds of thousands of copies of books, and using one for an interesting curio project will not drive the species to extinction.
Noooooo! Not the King of the Golden River! I have a very similar edition to the one shown... it had gorgeous illustrations. Probably Rackham as commented above. Now I have to start going through boxes looking for my copy. And read it again.
I think they look fantastic. And no, they wouldn't be as fantastic if they were law journals or bibles.
There's plenty of valuable old stuff being preserved and collected and treated with a holy reverence. We don't have to hold on to every pretty piece of the past.
These were not your books. These were her books. And she wanted to turn them into music boxes, which she did, and they're cool.
And Padster123, seriously? You're worried about what message this gives kids? I would have loved to get one of these when I was a kid. And I read shitloads of books.
Not like there's a mass hollow-out-precious-book craze going on. Everybody relax. I mean, shit, Cory posted this, and he seems like a bit of a book fan to me. I think he even wrote a few of them.
Oh, for pete's sake. Ever seen a book that's been scribbled in with indelible marker, or where someone's cut out parts of pages for some long-ago school project? Ever seen a bound copy with pied signatures, or an edition that printed and bound before someone noticed that a major technical glitch had messed up every page of the text? As books, they're dead. I'd rather they had a music box in them, to remind me that their interiors are ruined before I open them up and flinch.
Oskar, Asifa, the edition is a work of art. Individual copies are mass-produced artifacts. It's well that most of them are loved and protected, but it's not necessary that every clone-brother survive. These, at least, are one-of-a-kind artifacts. No one's drilled through a few thousand old volumes, run threaded rods through them to tighten them into units, bolted them to walls, and painted polyurethane sealant all over them as a "decorative wall treatment."
Bad things happen to good single copies. I love and respect books, but I used to be the head of production for a NYC publishing house. On more than a few occasions, I've had to razor the pages out of the binding of some nice book. I know that many booksellers hate stripping individual copies of paperbound books, but I used to get reports about what percentage of an entire edition had met that fate. And have you ever seen unopened cartons of hardcovers going to be pulped? I'll admit, that's a hard truth, and difficult to come to terms with. But the fact is, these things happen.
I like the music boxes.
If you think it's a sin and a shame for any book to get trashed, I have one question for you: do you live anywhere near Brooklyn?
has the TSA banned hardcovers with sharp corners yet?
Ths s wfl.
My standard plaint: Own a bookstore and the magic soon goes away. They're mostly just heavy goddamn piles of paper.
I made a book into a cigarette box decades ago. It was a copy of "Bright Leaf," of course.
"King of The Golden River"? I won't even look it up. I want to imagine it as kinky porn.
Wouldn't it be better if the music played as the book was opened? The exposed winder bothers me a bit.
I burnt a book for the first time ever this year; it gave me a strange sense of transgression.
I think these music boxes are fantastic. Some of you are assuming the pages of these books are in pristine condition. I'd wager they're not. I'm a school librarian and I throw out hundreds of books every year because they've been scribbled in, pages have been torn out, or any number of similar situations. Books are paper, and paper is fragile. This project gives them second life. Now they can sit on a shelf, looking and sounding beautiful.