Penguin Modern Classics Obsession Part Five:

A caveat regarding my Penguin Modern Classics wall art: The cover images in and of themselves are not what appeal to me. If these images came merely in the form of individual photos or prints, without a book attached, I wouldn’t be interested. What interests me specifically are: 1) the combination of image and book, the fact that each image is an artful, spare representation of the literary work beneath it; and 2) having the book itself on display, as an object, which can later be removed and read.

However, I’m not so much into using individual books as art pieces, hung on the wall by themselves; rather, I’d only want to put book covers on the wall as elements in themed series. (As previously indicated.) That way, a large part of what’s on display are the associations I can create between the cover images — and, by extension, between the books themselves. (Also, it fills up more wall space. Horror vacui!)

My themed-series idea reminds me of something Rob Giampietro mentions in his Design Observer piece about the increasing trend toward shelving books by color:

Organizing his books by color allows him to discover new and unexpected relationships between books he knows well already. When two unrelated books are forced to occupy the same shelf simply because of their spine color, the shelver is asked to think about whether they have ideas to share between them. Perhaps the designers of these chromatically-related books saw something in the books’ content that even their authors did not.

What I’m doing is more or less a variation on this. Rather than arranging books by their spine colors, I’m simply using a different surface of the book. (This arrangement method doesn’t easily lend itself to bookcases, of course. Hence the wall.)