Stephen Doyle's Book Art

Stephen Doyle is a graphic designer who has worked with Barnes & Noble, Martha Stewart, The New York Times, and Wired magazine, among others. (See his company's website here for more information.) More recently he started using books as his media, cutting up the pages, and reforming the paper into sculptures. The images here are Andre Malraux's "Man's Fate" (top), and "The Trial," using Franz Kafka's book.

"Felt and Wire" has a nice interview with him on this process. Especially interesting was this comment in response to the reason he uses books:

Books are where ideas come from. The book is such a great form. Before doing these works, I was making concrete casts of books. What interested me was, if you take all the information out, does the form still have any power?

Somewhere along the line I started wondering, well, what does happen when you take the ideas out? So, I started taking out the binding and the pages and setting the words free. And I’ve been working from there.