I thoroughly enjoyed yesterday’s presentation in the library. Every work we looked at was interesting and unique in its own way. I was especially intrigued by the altered book on the last tabled titled Le Corbusier and Me. This was an altered book, where the author takes a preexisting book and physically changes the book in some way to create a new work. The author of Le Corbusier and Me cut portions out of the pictures of Le Corbusier’s art and architecture to give readers a new perspective on Le Corbusier’s works. I was reminded by the book Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer (the author famous for Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close). I absolutely loved Tree of Codes . I read the book that it was altered from as well and found the connections (and lack thereof) incredibly interesting.
This article contains images of more altered books. They’re really cool works of art as well as different and interesting interpretations of texts that we may not think of.
I took a look at that Tree of Codes, and I certainly find it to be a neat book. Although, I wonder how exactly it fits into copyright laws. It isn’t direct plagiarism since the words are reassembled, but it still maintains the original as its foundation.
I must have somehow missed that book. I thought I got around to them all and I know which one you are talking about, but I don’t recall taking a look at it. These types of books are very cool though based on the link that you provided. I have seen pictures of whole chunks of books cut out to emphasize certain pages or chapters like so: http://media.techeblog.com/images/harry-potter-fan.jpg ,that I found to be really neat.
I also took a look at Tree of Codes and found it fascinating. I love that there are books out there that people have altered to resemble their own interpretations of the text. I too wonder how these types of books fit into copyright laws because they are someones original works adapted to a different persons interpretation.