Accent

Life illustrated

Here's a tip for you librarians in the reading audience. Turn the page. Hurry. Go to E7 for your horoscope or find "Non Sequitur" on the comics page. If you don't heed this advice, we can't be responsible for your mood today. On the other hand, for those who can bear the sight of murdered books, please continue. They're actually called "altered books," and the people who make them say they're taking weathered pages on the way to the landfill and turning them into mini works of art. Here's the concept. Think up a topic - say, love or ambition or family. Find an old bargain book, then commence to do cosmetic surgery that would make Joan Rivers proud. Instead of collagen and Botox, however, you'll be working with paint and stamps and scraps of lace and buttons and yarn. You might paint over whole pages at a time, cut or fold pages into shapes, drill holes or cut windows into the book to insert thick objects like Monopoly pieces or Scrabble tiles. You might remove pages of the book to make it less thick. Or you might just let it expand, inviting guests to peruse its wonders. You may use the theme of the book to inspire the art you put into it - or simply use the pages as your canvas. You'll know you're hooked when you find yourself wielding embossing powder at 4 a.m. Or stalking the hardware aisles looking for aluminum tape or drywall mesh and making strange requests of clerks in orange aprons. That's what Linda Deters, a nurse, did when she went looking for bolt cutters to cut the keys off an old typewriter, and the confounded clerk asked why she'd want to do a thing like that. (Other altered-book artists, who have all had to field similar inquiries, are ready to jump in with comebacks: "Because my therapist said I should" is one; "Want to see what else these bolt cutters can do?" is another.) You'll know you're among the elite group of book-alterers if your husband starts stowing his tomes away because he sees that gleam in your eye. Like when Julee Davis, a stay-at-home mom of two, was too sick to go buy a book recently and started casting covetous glances at the bookshelf. You can tell the real altered-book artists from the fakes when they sit around a table comparing war injuries. Davis' came from a razor. Rose Adair, a high school language arts teacher, recalled using a hammer to drive an imprint into a book, only to miss and find herself dancing in the kitchen with her finger in a bag of frozen peas. These women are all devotees of altering books, an art form that gets more popular every day. There are about 5,500 people in the Yahoo! group devoted to altered books, but enthusiasts so far have identified only 13 in Tucson, and they meet as an informal group. For the Tucson women, their books can be full of memories. Kim Bayne, a freelance writer whose mother died two years ago, has found some healing while working on a book about ancestors. The books might be funny. Like the one about irreverence, with sayings like, "What keeps your ears apart?" or "Sacred cows make great hamburgers." They might be cathartic. One woman has a book about her husband's infidelity. Altered books can be intensely individual, like the woman who traced her pregnancy through book art. They can also be communal. In what's called a "round robin," book owners will agree to circulate books among themselves, each adding something to the theme. The originator doesn't get her book back for six months, but when she does it's full of interesting interpretations on the theme. Bayne, who is Jewish, sent one out on Judaism and got it back decorated with the fringe from a prayer shawl, with a richly colored biblical story of Dina. Some teachers have started using them in their courses. One of Adair's colleagues told her students to do a book outlining their dream trip, using applied mathematics. Adair's son also did one, on a trip to Lake Powell. Under one picture of a houseboat, he calculated the cost to rent one. Some got maybe too creative. One girl, who wanted a horseback trip, affixed an envelope holding a piece of horse dung. We don't know what her grade was. But there's something to be said for working the left and right brain simultaneously, which is why Bayne got so enamored of altering books. A technology journalist who's written books about high-tech marketing, Bayne felt like her creativity was being drained out of her. Now she's so creative, she's a bit scary. She's been known to nose-dive for the garbage to pluck an overlooked jewel out of it, like a discarded necklace, or a tag from a dress, or a piece of rusty metal or a wedding announcement. She keeps those cardboard coffee sleeves you get at the java shop, and once, when she was looking for red hearts to create a love theme, she found herself using a hole punch on a McDonald's french fry holder. So, really, anything goes. Except altering an important, old, collector's item kind of book. That they won't do. Maybe that will make you librarians who couldn't tear your eyes away feel better. And the great thing about altering books is that if you mess up, you can rip out the page. No one will know. Now, where's that latest Steve Forbes book? It must be around here somewhere, just aching for a little glitter.