Weird and Creative Things to Do With Books

Plug in the deep fryer, grab the tongs, roll up your sleeves and start cooking the books. Just mix up some batter, dip the tomes and fry. It’s a bit messy, but if you add colored cereal before you fry them, the books come out looking really…well…colourful.

As part of the Chicago’s Columbia College's Manifest Urban Arts Festival, artists John LaFalce and Drew Luan Matott battered, deep fried, sealed and signed dozens of books. They were making a statement about unhealthy lifestyles and disregard for intellectualism in America. Some of the books actually do look good enough to eat.

You don’t have to be a surgeon to cut up dead novels. It’s certainly beyond my artistic abilities, but if you’re good with a scalpel you can design some seriously cool sculptures from your unwanted books. You may want to study the methods a bit first, though.

Brian Dettmer shows off some phenomenal artistry on his site. He carves through books to reveal the inner artwork, producing the most amazing three-dimensional sculptures you’ve ever seen. How does he do that?!

If you run out of firewood or just want to have a backyard bonfire, you can just use those books you were going to donate. There’s a good chance nobody really wants them anyway.

You won’t be the only one doing it. In a bid to “spark a conversation about the importance of books in the face of a marked shrinking in reading trends”, bookseller Tom Wayne barbeques hundreds of books. He calls it “a funeral pyre for thought in America”.

Ok, so it’s not exactly creative…but wait…you’re creating a party atmosphere, and you’re also creating space on your shelves. Works for me.

A bar, storage shelves, a bookshelf…you can furnish your whole apartment with made-from-books furniture. Cheap enough if you go to the used book store, or hey, maybe you can get them free from the burning book guy. They make for real conversation pieces, too. I wonder if you’d have to worry about bookworms, though…human or otherwise.

Secret book boxes are a great way to hide your valuables. Just hollow out the pages of your favourite books and voila, a neat little hidey-hole for your stash…er…I mean your jewellery. Nobody will ever know, unless they go browsing through your book collection and happen to pull out the wrong title.

Of course you have to make them first, but that’s kind of a fun way to spend the day. The simplest edible books are made from bread, with the pages being slices of meat or cheese, but you can get mighty creative in the kitchen and come up with some true works of bookish art.

Some of the masterpieces created at the International Edible Book Festival look real enough to put in your bookshelf. I wonder how they taste?