Bee’s Knees: Spineless Classics

Hello, and welcome to the Bee’s Knees, the weekly column showcasing some of the many creative ways words and pictures can be combined! This week’s feature is an amazing project called Spineless Classics. Spineless? What does it mean?

Imagine you took your favorite book of all time and tore the pages out one by one. Then you somehow taped them to each other, find a frame big enough to fit the whole thing, and put it on your wall. That’s a hard thing to imagine, but it’s been done…and beautifully.

Back in 2007, a group of artists and book lovers started designing posters that were unlike anything else. Each poster contains an entire, readable classic book on it. To add further attraction, each poster also has a silhouette of artwork relating to the story placed in the middle of the poster. What makes it really amazing is the fact that these posters don’t take up an entire wall, but are actually small enough to be framed quite easily.

How does that work? A lot of it has to do with the size of the text. The entire book is featured on the poster, word for word, and it is surprisingly legible, though small enough that it would be best read with a magnifying glass. Many classics have already been converted, including Gulliver’s Travels, Pride and Prejudice, and Romeo and Juliet. If you wanted, you could stand reading the poster all day and not find a word out of place. This is especially fascinating considering the large silhouetted images that take up a lot of the poster space.

That’s the bee’s knees for this week! Please join me next Friday for another way people blend words and pictures to create all-new forms of art. In the meantime, feel free to tell me in the comments section if there’s something you know of I should write about. I love finding out about new things!