this is done amazingly well. wonderful

I love it!!! Brings a warmness to the room..

This is inspiring, I totally dig this.

How fun!

sweet! though i hope they were otherwise damaged/unreadable. i find it sad to see books used as decoration!

My library sends hundreds of books (withdrawn and unusable donated ones) to a recycling plant every month. Here is another use. But I wouldn't recommend it anywhere where splatters of oil, water, foodstuffs, etc would hit the pages... it could repidly get truly disgusting! Even dust could be a problem. (Maybe you could spray the finished unit with a clear sealer...)

(There would be a LOT of weight in this, too -- you'd need properly engineered floors.)

I wonder if the books were trimmed at all? As the pages are facing out, I would imagine that they haven't been. Otherwise the binding would have been cut off, meaning that the pages are essentially loose. Otherwise, neat idea.

Hey! I've been in there! Sweet - finally somewhere near me in lovely Melbourne....
For those who want to get all up-close-and-tactile, it's at Brunswick Bound and it's a very cool bookstore - great stuff without the snooty attitude (I like my book abodes aesthetically pleasing and kooky).

http://www.brunswickbound.com.au/

Abomination.
Sorry.

i can understand books in sculpture, but maybe if they were all cook books would the kitchen counter make sense. What we are and what we know as humans can be displayed and alluded to with a pile of books, which means its our responsibility to make sure the content of the books is good, there are bad books, but to see them capped is somewhat sad, maybe a better idea would be bookshelf counter? its pretty cool though if you can live with it

I've seen Book Art before but this takes it to a whole new level! How did they hold them together? Actually impressive when you think how much work it must have taken. Wonder how it would look if you did one with binders out and for a coffee table. Maybe a bunch of old leather bound encyclopedias or something.

Perfect for a book store. That's where lots of books belong...

It's kind of perverse.

I think this is cool.

Wow, that's so creative. Love it.

I like it. It looks like a wall of warm bricks.

I find it pretty horrifying.

Looooove it! And in Melbourne, is even better - thanks for the link I'll have to drop by!

I remember a segment on bhg making bookshelves out of books. If I find the link, I'll post it here.

I would think they'd have to heavily seal the books so they don't get stained and soften. Love it, can't wait to find an excuse to make one myself :)

genius! would be even cooler if the bindings were showing. kind of like a kookie quilt

I like the brick/rock effect that it creates showing the pages, but I would be interested to see how it looks with the bindings showing as well. I wonder though, if the book titles would end up as more of a distraction when people see books they hate/love being used to build furniture.

That is ASTOUNDING! Can you imagine the math and fussing involved to get the right size books in the right places for both even sides and an even top?!?! Completely brilliant.

No better way to advertise the end of your business then to show your customers how few are sold for their original purpose. I fear hard cover print media will follow print news at this rate.
Rather sad but somewhat interesting design.

It is interesting to see how many takes people are taking to this, some just think it's horrifying, others think it's a great idea and yet still others think it's a sad state of books.

One point so few are pointing out is that there are so many BAD, out dated books out there, in both hard bound and otherwise that have no other use but to repurpose them and if you look I bet dollars to donuts it's mostly old books that aren't worth anything that would otherwise be taken to a recycler, here, is put to a good use as a counter.

It's amazing what DOES get printed and some of that stuff is simple BAD, poorly written, badly edited, etc, or simply boring stuff that almost no one reads but a few specialized individuals so a lot of these books get printed in volume but not sold so SOMETHING has to be done with them other than dumping them into a landfill. Recycling or repurposing them is the best option.

this is the perfect setting for a counter like this. it's an amazing use for damaged or over-run books. I diagree about the titles showing - i would find it distracting.

Creative. Definitely.

It does look great, but the poster who talked about cleanliness is right. I think that would be an issue.

Very creative, though I don't think it is quite the engineering feat most are marveling about. I suspect that it has a wood (or whatever) base that has been faced with books. Still, very nice.

This just makes me so sad. I love books, I love old books, and honestly I highly doubt that every book in there is a terrible book no one would ever want to read. Yeah, it looks cool... but that's not what books are for. And to hear books described as being "cluttery"... ugh. If you have books you don't want anymore, try donating them to Books for Africa or a similar program. That said, donation won't necessarily work for older books, and sometimes something like this IS about all that can be done with old books... but design has a conceptual element, and the concept here is a total turn-off for me. Even if the books are useless I still dislike this... I'd rather see them re-made into journals or art even than this.

Hmm, can you tell I'm the lawyer daughter of a librarian and an English teacher, engaged to an academic? We feel strongly about books around here!

But seriously, I've traveled a lot in the developing world, and people TREASURE the oldest, silliest, most battered, out-of-date books. So this has a wasteful "feel" to me, even if technically these books don't have another use.

Why? Why? books are precious

I did a lot of book- and paper-making in college. Our hardest project involved creating a new book out of two existing books. Everyone felt as if we were breaking some terrible taboo and it turned out to be an emotional experience.

It's ingrained in us all that books are to be respected and never destroyed, but the fact is that all books are not created equal.

A hardcover first edition of a Mark Twain novel is obviously worth infinitely more than a drug store romance novel, but this isn't solely due to the content, but also the construction.

When properly taken care of, only hardbound books are meant to last forever. Anything less will eventually deteriorate at the binding and the paper will yellow and become brittle. Well bound books from centuries ago are in better condition than hastily mass-produced books from this decade.

Most of a book's cost comes from its time spent on press -- its material cost is negligible in comparison. Hardcover books are so much more expensive because some hard work goes into the binding.

If someone wants to repurpose a mass produced hardcover for a project like this one, I have no qualms with it. If they want to senselessly destroy it, it's quite another matter. However, anyone repurposing a book should first ensure that they are not denying the world something rare.

I have worked with used books for over ten years and I have seen some terrible waste of paper in my time. (In every sense of that phrase.) At the book store where we bought books from people, two types were on the "strictly forbidden to buy because they will never resell in a million years" list: Reader's Digest Condensed Books and any hardcover book club (buy six for a penny) books. We were trained in how to spot these (smaller than the originals and they have a serial number in the back.) When people were told they couldn't sell them to us, rather than lug them all home, they would leave them by our dumpster, where they would get thrown in the trash. When I ran my own used book department I tried putting them out for $1 each and left them for 2 months. Nada. So I have to say there are, books out there that need to be re-purposed so they aren't being tossed out. As for sending them overseas, most companies (and people) won't do something unless it can be done with little cost and little inconvenience to them, and that's why books sit in landfills.