Ever since I started making the Book Purses five years ago, I have been struck with how powerful the memories triggered by old book covers can be. For me, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and other serial mysteries like the Bobbsey Twins and Happy Holisters, are reminiscent of lazy summer days, reading up in my playhouse, or under the covers after I was supposed to be in bed. I would drag my parents to every yard sale I saw, rummaging through for whatever books I was missing from the series. I longed for the excitement that Nancy and friends had; the long forgotten treasure discovered in a dusty corner, or a secret passageway hidden behind a trick bookshelf.

Now as an artist reusing old books, I find that Nancy Drew and her peers are incredibly powerful triggers to many other folks. These covers are the ones that elicit gasps of recognition from across the show aisle, and turn otherwise staid adults into squealing kids again, if just for a moment of gleeful remembrance.

I hear over and over, “My mom got rid of all Nancy Drews when I went to college!” These books we treasured as children were often not treated well, and are now so often found damaged and forgotten on dusty shelves at thrift stores, library sales, and of course, yard sales. I still get a thrill at seeing that yellow spine peeking out from a shelf, except now I’m not trying to complete my own set.

Instead, I rescue these well-loved artifacts of our childhood, and transform them into unexpected yet functional artworks. Like the broken locket or the old album, these books are not what they seem. You can tuck the handles inside and hide them on your bookshelf, and store your own secrets inside.

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.