I have seen a lot of things made from books, some amazing, some appalling, and the occasional thing that simply leaves me flabbergasted.
This falls into the latter category, and then some;whilst I really cannot see the point of even attempting this (it must be so heavy and cumbersome) I do think it is fascinating watching the evolution from a pile of old books into the finished product. This really is the strangest thing I’ve seen made from books, how about you, have you seen anything stranger?
I also happen to like the first comment on this video, I used to be a book purist but now I can see why books should be reused and re purposed rather than being left to moulder into nothingness on some long forgotten shelf.
JoshSundquist
I’m an author and I care greatly about books. You are certainly welcome to your own opinion, but before you say these books were “ruined” or “destroyed,” I ask you to pause and consider:
1. Most books are read once (statistically, in fact, less than once) and then they sit on a shelf till the end of time. These books have instead been given a second life, recycled into a mobility aid. I would say that we repurposed the art of the written word into the art of a prosthesis that celebrates the books that it is made of.
2. If you feel like they are ruined merely because they are used in an artificial leg now, I would ask: Is the metal in a soda can “ruined” if you recycle it and it is used to make a prosthesis? Just because a thing is repurposed does not mean the original substance is ruined. That’s why recycling as a concept makes sense. It conserves, both in terms of raw materials and cost (like, compare the price of materials in a book leg to a traditional prosthesis, which would cost minimum $25k)
3. If you feel like they are ruined because it seems like the only benefit a particular copy of a book can provide is when someone reads the pages, I would ask: Where does the average book end up? On a book shelf in our living rooms where its spine is occasionally noticed by people who walk by the shelf and stop to read the titles. So, like, the total number of people who derive benefit from that copy is whatever number of visitors we have per year who see and appreciate that particular copy. Depending on when you see this, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of people will have seen this video. Many of them will have hopefully remembered how much they liked one of these books when they originally read it or saw a new book in this stack that they wanted to read for the first time. Are these particular copies therefore not providing significantly more net benefit to the world than the average book gathering dust on a shelf?
The Devil all the Time adaptation coming to Netflix
