Video removed by the user.

They pulled the video. But clearly the woman is a piece of shit for destroying books.

I'm gonna make a box out of a set of old encyclopedias... and then use it as a custom PC case.

I would do it with Reader's Digest Condensed Books, or bound collections of sermons by long-dead relatives, but that's about it.

A bunch of bibles make a great place to hide your weed.

This is the world we now live in.

First, they made ash trays out of old vinyl albums, and I didn't speak out...

Maybe she's cut out all the pages to scan them so she can cherish her favorites digitally forever. I'm sure that must be it.

She couldn't even be bothered to arrange them in numerical order. There are two number ones and three number nines. Apparently, they're arranged by color? Or something?

What a terrible human being.

No one is going to do this to valuable or interesting books. No one who is going to do this has ever SEEN a valuable or interesting book. Not to worry. I mean, look at what she's got there in the video -- "A Series of Unfortunate Events". OH MY GOD YOU ARE A CRAZY WOMAN.

I once saw a whole shelf of identically-bound "Sermons of Billy Graham". If I had the shelf space it would be amusing to make a box out of them. KEEP YER WEED IN IT. DUDE!

Notice the books she's murdering are A Series of Unfortunate Events, a series of books that the reader is admonished not to read.

@10, you can buy collections of books with specific color spines, for decorating -- like living in an Ikea!

http://www.etsy.com/shop/jaysworld?secti…

It's a "bookshelf box".
Does anyone have extra room on their bookshelves for such a thing?
All the room on my bookshelves is taken by books.

So this is something for someone with bookshelves but without enough books that they want to keep to fill the shelves.
But who likes the look of having books on a bookshelf in her home even if they aren't real books.

@ 13, when I worked at Tattered Cover in the 90s I heard about how someone once came in to buy hundreds of books for his or her newly redecorated home's built-in bookcases. The sole criterion for purchase was how nice they looked on the shelves. I think they bought a set of the OED among other things.

She doesn't know any better.

Does this work with old kindles, as well?

There are tons of Etsy sellers who pull this shit. They cut out a page from an old medical textbook, slap a bird on it, and then frame it.

@11,

How do you know know that?

I was at a Goodwill recently and briefly considered picking up a fifty cent copy of some Bill O'Reilly book to keep by my charcoal grill, tearing out a few pages at a time to use as kindling.

@11 -
"Oh my GAWD!!! That book is gorgeous!"
"Oh, thank you, it's one of the original Gutenberg Bibles, in fact."
"No way! Where'd you get it?"
"Well, my grandfather bought it at auction in 1972."
"Auction, huh? Never heard of it. Do you think they have it at Barnes and Nobles?"
"This is a Gutenberg Bible. They were printed in the 1450s. You won't find it at a retail store."
"Oh, well, I simply must have it. How much do you want for it? Fifty bucks?"
"What?"
"Fifty bucks and a blowjob?"

Soon, a book is ruined forever.

I turned the Alcoholics Anonymous book into a flask holder. Next I'll be turning the big Mormon volumes I found in my house into a concealed mini bar. But I wouldn't take an exacto knife to much else.

@ 20, I can just about condone THAT.

@15 - This does happen. I went to visit my newly married sister and her husband. My sister is not a reader, so I was surprised to see books in her living room and interesting books, to boot. I was shocked, because her husband had not heretofore been identified as a kindred spirit, but there was the evidence in front of me, so I asked about the books, figuring she would tell me they belonged to him.

She told me they bought them at a yard sale to decorate the shelves!!

I didn't know whether to weep or start sneaking the books out one by one to give to deserving readers.

@9: That's what I tell myself when I hear about stuff like this. It helps me sleep at night.

Used book stores will frequently sell well-bound books by the foot for set dressing or decoration; matching heights, colors, etcetera costs extra. But they've got to cover the rent somehow, and most used bookstore owners and workers are heavy readers and love books. This image-obsessed ninny exemplifies the idea of judging a book by its cover.

It's for a hiding place, that's all. Has nothing to do with being literary or not literary. And you'd want boring titles so that no one would be interested in reaching for it. I think it's cute.

This is what books are for.

Slog bibliophiles: prepare to have an aneurysm.

@26, I had a hollowed-out tome called The American Story in which I cached rarely used credit cards, a safe-deposit-box key, my Social Security card, and a few Series E savings bonds.

Despite its bland title, cloth binding, and tiny gold lettering, it was the one book that an OCD-afflicted, philosophy-and-history-nut neighbor zeroed in on one day, amongst all of my other hundreds of books on wildly divergent topics, with intriguing titles and bold graphics.

@19, how do I know know what?

What do you other Sloggers think of the work of the 3 artists I have linked here? These aren't the only ones working with books but you get the idea. I personally love Detmar's and Laramee's work.

http://briandettmer.com/

http://thisiscentralstation.com/featured…

http://www.jacquelinerushlee.com/images/…

I love books, actual books as objects as well as for what they contain. This horrible craft project reminds of the Gloria Upson, the philistine fiance in "Auntie Mame", exclaiming, "Oh, books! How decorative!" The book boxes are crappy and unimaginative, and tacky, but I doubt anyone is going to detroy any really valuable books doing this because people like that don't buy good books.

@28, "... in very good to new condition." EXCEPT FOR THE HALF OF THE BOOK WE SAWED OFF. AUGH!

Some art projects are perfect for books. Some project are worthy of book sacrifice. This, for example: http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lfo591…

Lauren's crappy craft isn't even well executed! Uneven, xacto-hacked edges and hot glue seeping out the sides. It's horrid!

how dare you deny this lovely girl a living. ms. conrad has to do SOMETHING, doesn't she?

I don't know. I would think about doing something like this (though not this - putting something like this on a bookshelf is just stupid - if you wanted it for storage, just put the box there. Geez) with something like Reader's Digest Condensed Books. There are always a million of them at second hand stores and yard sales, the spines are usually kinda nice, and they aren't worth reading. (My parents were subscribers for years. When I read the actual books, I was shocked at how much good stuff was cut out). Using those for crafts would not be the end of the world.

But I would probably not ever do it with a "real" book. The ones I would want to do it to, I wouldn't want to actually have displayed in my home.

I am hacksawing the cover off of my Liber Novus tonight for sure.

@30,

That they aren't using real books. I mean, certainly they're not if they're buying them from a used bookstore, a real vendor isn't going to sell good vintage books cheap, but what if they belonged to the crafter's grandparents? Or were bought cheap at a garage sale? I shudder to think how many fantastic books are getting turned into crappy hipster art.

@35- at home we used the Readers Digest Condensed Books (thank you, Grandma) as building materials for more books shelves. Think cinder blocks and boards without the cinder blocks.

True fact: Google made fake bookshelf wall coverings like these out of books that they cut apart to scan for Google Books.

@37, as someone who has spent half his life in used bookstores, and also worked for five years in the Harvard library system (100+ libraries), I can assure you that there is an almost infinite supply of terrible books available for this sort of project. Thrift stores are packed with them, and send millions to be pulped every year. Even old books, 100 years old or more.

One of my favorite parts of my Harvard job was the unfettered access, 24/7, to the Widener stacks, which at that time contained miles of shelves of truly unbelievable material. My favorite section was the entire aisle of Victorian poetry, a couple of thousand volumes, all beautifully printed with ornate gold-embossed boards between 1870-1910, all of them utterly unreadable, most of them still with the old-fashioned hand-written checkout cards, indicating that the last and only time the thing was checked out was April 9, 1881.

I don't think anyone's going to miss a few if they get turned into dope caddies or sculptures. It's probably better than where they are now, which is encased away in a remote computer warehouse facility, cataloged without title or author, only as "Victorian Poetry" or "Poetry, Victorian" or "Fuck Me, There's a Lot of These Goddamn Things".

I'm sure I'll get flamed for this...

But I think this is actually a great idea.

Now, I have several shelves of books that I would never dream of cutting up but I have some shelves that just have a bunch of crap stored on them. I've made some amount of effort to make them look ok but it's still mostly random crap. I could totally see going to the thrift store and buying a pile of hardcover books at $.50-$1.00 and doing this to make my random storage shelves look better.

And, as others have noted. You can put your weed in there.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muA5EBmpD…

There is nothing wrong with destroying books. Books are highly useless. Have you read Lemony Snicket? It's garbage. Megan McCain's book? Do I just have to wait 60 years before someone on the internet tries to rip me apart for suggesting any harm should come to it?

The fact that the books are out of order and haphazard is terrible.

I've turned a 50c Goodwill copy of one of Anne Coulter's books into a hollowed-out storage space for a flask of rum for a birthday gift, I felt no guilt or shame at that...

WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO A PERFECTLY READABLE BOOK?

I'm reminded of the first time I walked into an Anthropologie and they had huge displays of cut up books (all in good condition, all classics like Dickens, Bronte, Austen) and I swooned. It was like walking into a Civil War-era surgery, piled high with dismembered limbs... I occasionally have nightmares about it.

In 2000, a soon-to-be failed start-up I was working for bought 1,500 books from Elliott Bay and cut the books up to be scanned for an online book project. When I quit, they let me keep the mutilated books and we had a big book-binding party. We gave the repaired books away to rural libraries, etc. although I still have a few books on my shelves with duct taped spines. This youtube video brings back the memories.

There are probably thousands of books that are suitable for this project. I could easily build a house out of unwanted copies of The Corrections, or A Million Little Pieces, or The Bluest Eye, etc. And those are books that might be worth your time to read. The amount of books that are worth no one's time to read is great enough to fill warehouses. I can promise you that hundreds of them are pulped every day. If it's not rare or precious you might as well get some joy out of cutting them up for your craft project.

WHO THE HECK WOULD DO THIS TO A VINTAGE BOOK? You wanna get crafty? Make some FAKE spines that just LOOK like vintage books. It's like using fifty-year-old wine to create bloodstains for a Halloween costume.