That's amazing, and a little horrifying. It's amazing what he's managing to do with them, and some of them are beautiful, but at the same time, well, they're *books*. I have all sorts of deep-seated convictions that it's just plain wrong to damage books. The fact that these are encyclopedias, and would undoubtedly end up in a landfill otherwise helps, but that little voice is still there saying "but...."
Not certain if I'm offended that someone is desecrating the holy temple of books, or relieved that someone has found a use for them now that we're all going digital.
Sometimes a book has died -- it's the penalty of creating something timely for the masses. I even have a dead set of the condensed Oxford Dictionaries that a friend picked up at a garage sale. Oxford English Dictionary! But they're going to leave, because they smell moldy to me. Someone else killed them, and the corpses are making me ill.
This is a brilliant use of overflow. I hope that copies of these books are in the Library of Congress, because looking at how our ancestors viewed the world is instructive. Otherwise, I merely admire his tremendous gift and focus!
I know what you mean -- it's almost impossible for me to toss a book, I have to pass it on to someone else. It took me forever to learn to mark up textbooks in college. Eventually I did it only to a two book translation on contemporary art that was difficult to follow, so I used a highlighter for core concepts in paragraphs.
But I did see my mother rip a paperback in half and toss it into a trash masher once. So I knew that a book could, indeed, die!
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IOW, the books he's using are otherwise of at best historical interest, and would be likely to be discarded if he didn't do this with them.
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This is a brilliant use of overflow. I hope that copies of these books are in the Library of Congress, because looking at how our ancestors viewed the world is instructive. Otherwise, I merely admire his tremendous gift and focus!
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But I did see my mother rip a paperback in half and toss it into a trash masher once. So I knew that a book could, indeed, die!
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~twitch~ ~twitch~
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