Since I began making the Book Purses, my favorite books to use have always been old textbooks and reference books. They are ubiquitous in library discard piles and thrift stores, as they become obsolete so quickly, and used book stores have an impossible time finding new homes for them.

I wanted to create a tableau reminiscent of elementary schools of days gone by, when every report you turned in was full of information culled from your parents’ dusty encyclopedias, not copied and pasted from Wikipedia, and if you needed to spell a word, you had to look in a dictionary, rather than rely on spell-check.

Every letter of the alphabet is represented here by an encyclopedia turned into a purse. Surprisingly, I was unable to find 26 different sets, so there is some overlap of editions, and most volumes contain more than one letter, but I feel this is a good representation of the many different reference books we all used so often.

The myriad volumes that used to fill our heads with knowledge have been displaced by the digital age, and what used to take up shelf after shelf can now be accessed in an instant from devices that fit in the palm of your hand. These lovely, yet obsolete carriers of outdated information can now be used to carry a phone that can access the entire internet, and serve as a memento of days gone by.

For more information, and to purchase any of the work displayed, please visit www.rebounddesigns.etsy.com.