A few years ago we inherited my Grandmother's old Encyclopedia set. Not needing them for reference (thanks Google) we sat down with a razor blade and extracted all the fantastic images that were bound inside. We filed them all away and it's the perfect resource for inexpensive holiday gift giving and birthdays. Click through for more Encyclopedia uses after the jump...
Look! Old Encyclopedia Pages
Here's a few of our favorite ways to put an old Encyclopedia to use!
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If the encyclopedias are really out of date, I say go for it. Otherwise, please consider donating them to a school or prison or even a library. There are so many people who could use reference materials.
view jakelegs's profile
They are from the 50's! No worries!
-Sarahrae
view sarahrae's profile
i did this with a set of 50's book of knowledge that my mother was discarding years ago. the article on opera yielded some great prints of Callas that i still have on the wall, and a file of photos and illustrations that i rotate periodically.
view carolynapplebee's profile
I need those jellyfish!
view Caitlin in Seattle's profile
Caitlin -
The jellyfish illustration is by Ernst Haeckel, you can find it in books of his prints such as Art Forms in Nature.
view Noe's profile
Stunning! I love the jellyfish too!
view RedOrangePink's profile
Re: Ernst Haeckel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Haeckel
No need to tear anything apart...this link will give you TONS of gorgeous Haeckel prints in a very high resolution, just right-click save them and print them out on a nice printer. They turn out beautiful! Enjoy.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur
view btoddster's profile
Hmm... this is a nice idea to do with a set of your own if you know it is not a rarity and truly have no other use for it, but I am always very careful about buying old book pages already cut up. I have some friends/old colleagues who are very involved in archaeology/art/antiquities/rare books (academics/consultants for Christie's) and they used to rant about this on a regular basis... many old books have been destroyed by people cutting out pages to sell; I know that one monastery in Switzerland we worked at actually bans visitors from their library now (they have manuscripts dating back the 1100s) because they have had people steal pages from books by razoring them out-- easier to steal a few pages than a stack of rare books. How awful it would be to unwittingly buy one of those pages on eBay to put on your wall! I do think old encyclopedia pages are usually OK, but be wary of old maps and block prints, and of anything at all you know is pre-1800. Another great source is old scientific journals; many of them had beautiful hand-colored plates, and you can be *sure* that they are out of date!
view marie516's profile