September 16th, 2008

By John DeFore

Though bibliophiles instinctively recoil at the idea, the fact is that some books are good for nothing: outdated science texts, surplus copies of bestsellers everyone owns, current-events hack jobs by disreputable writers looking to make a quick buck. If you can’t even give a book away, what’s to be done with it?

While it is possible to recycle old books, you likely can’t do it in your curbside bin: The glues and binding materials don’t play well with the machines used by most municipal programs. If you’re graduate designer Laura Cahill, you make furniture out of them.

Cahill, who exhibited some of her wares at London’s New Designers event, was looking around for waste goods to use as raw material when she thought of books, which have some built-in structural properties that lend themselves to a variety of uses. The most appealing of the works she showed, a set of vases, isn’t new — you may have come across something similar in a nice museum’s gift shop — but two other objects are more novel. In one, she drills through two stacks of books, turns them on their sides, and bolts them to wood to make a stool; in another she extends the flower-vase process vertically to make a sensuously curved floor lamp. (Don’t worry, she doesn’t put anything flammable near the bulb.)

Cahill’s work is popping up on enough blogs that it may not be long before artsy types around the country are turning their college computer science and history texts into bandsaw-sculpted objets d’art.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media