Guy Laramee has found an unsettling way to keep books out of the landfill and bonfire. It is clever and decidedly artistic, yet somehow barbaric. Perhaps it is a sign of our times that society has become so fearful,conservative even regressive, that ancient stone, cave dwellings and archaic justice seem attractive,even idyllic.

Beside me sits a 1968 set of Britannica books, all of them. I bought them new but seldom use them, except to compare their scholarship to the online Wikipedia versions. Certainly there are valuable papers being published and it is much easier to type a question than drag out a ten pound volume (and who in their right mind would carry a set around with them to the park bench or favorite fishing spot?), yet I did move them abroad and from coast to desert. So maybe that says something about my own mental state. Perhaps I am the one who is too stuck in the past, too anxious about our future.

What if those obsolete books are only good for carving, like fine old wood, and Laramee has given us a new way of preserving them, a lasting tribute to the Gutenberg revolution. Surely the content is already buried in the pile of culture so deep it cannot be retrieved in any useful form.

I urge you to visit his sites and thank Visual News for publishing it.