These artists give books a second life as beautiful works of art, converting everything from outdated computing books to children’s classics into visual masterpieces, all using little more than a scalpel and some imagination. In no particular order (they’re too awesome to rank) here are the top ten artworks created from old books:

“Pandora Opens Box” by Sue Blackwell.

It is the delicacy, the slight feeling of claustrophobia, as if these characters, the landscape have been trapped inside the book all this time and are now suddenly released. A number of the compositions have an urgency about them, the choices made for the cut-out people from the illustrations seem to lean towards people on their way somewhere, about to discover something, or perhaps escaping from something. And the landscapes speak of a bleak mystery, a rising, an awareness of the air.

A landscape created out of cut up paper by Scottish artist Georgia Russell.

One of the masterfully crafted book landscapes from Canadian interdisciplinary artist (and part time anthropologist) Guy Laramée.

We are currently told that the paper book is bound to die. The library, as a place, is finished. One might ask so what? Do we really believe that “new technologies” will change anything concerning our existential dilemma, our human condition? And even if we could change the content of all the books on earth, would this change anything in relation to the domination of analytical knowledge over intuitive knowledge? What is it in ourselves that insists on grabbing, on casting the flow of experience into concepts?

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