I first saw books-turned-journals at a Capsule design fair in San Francisco and immediately fell in love with the idea. The creative force behind them is Ex Libris Anonymous (love the name too!). Basically, they repurpose old books into new journals/sketchbooks, filling them with blank pages. They use everything from cookbooks and children’s books to old novels and Nancy Drews, making it pretty fun to search through the stock to try to find ones with special meaning for you. Totally affordable too — $13. Some of my current faves:
Hop on Pop, the first book I learned to read!
Travel journal?
Recipe book?
Just plain hilarious.
Some more details from the Ex Libris website:
“the journals are filled with about 75 sheets of 24/60#, acid free, BLANK paper, which is a nice journaling or sketching paper. inside the front cover and throughout every book we retain any beautiful cover pages, illustrations, library cards, maps, inscriptions, or what-have-you found in the book (we find all kinds of beautiful stuff in these old books). and it’s all held together with a black plastic spiral.”
Happy hunting!
It is a cute idea, but maybe priced about twice what it should be. Recycling nice-looking covers is a good idea in and of itself.
I don’t think the price is bad at all! The last journal I bought was somewhere around $10-15.