Thomas makes some fantastic art work using pulp fiction books, a sharp blade, and a camera. Though we hate seeing books mutilated, this time we don’t mind so much because the results may be more interesting and precious than the books themselves. It’s quite charming. He’s even published some of his work in a book, which will inevitably lead to inevitable meta-book-art.

[Thomas Allen]

Have a look at Amy Fleisher’s work. Among other things, she’s done a series of work for Penguin Books to celebrate their 75th Anniversary. She’s made a fun little series of book covers featuring the penguin books logo thematised to that particular book’s content. It’s quite cute and playful yet as a graphical device it gets right to the point. I would be nice to see a few more examples to really show the potential of the idea though.

[Amy Fleisher]

Josh Cooley out of California does a lot of drawing. He does it for his job as a story artist but clearly also for pleasure too. Up on his blog he has a few fun series going on. One of my favorite is his Inapropriate Golden Books – a play on the Little Golden Books published for children, but with a mash-up of inappropriately non-kid-friendly movie material mixed in for good measure. Unfortunately his blog does not have a good categorization or sorting feature which means that you’ll have to hunt a bit for the Inappropriate Golden book pieces in particular, but the good thing is that the rest of the stuff you’ll be sifting through is also worth a look. It’s a shame he doesn’t update more often.

[Cooley!]

Paul Tassi has put some illustrations up on his site for an alphabet book. As expected there is one page for each letter of the alphabet beginning with “A is for…” Does he follow up with ‘apple’? No. He gets a bit more into it. He follows through each letter of the alphabet with the most bad-ass alliterative combinations he can come up with, complete with illustrations to boot. Enjoy.

[Unreality]

Yesterday in Massachusetts, Eric Carle’s Museum of Picture Book Art played host to Crayola who presented Carle with a crayon. But wait. Theres more. It was a 5-foot tall crayon. This wasn’t just any big crayon though. It was in a special edition Crayola color entitled “Very Hungry Caterpillar Green to honor Eric Carle’s celebrated children’s book which celebrates it’s 40th anniversary this year (Carle himself celebrates his 80th this year). Icecream and cake were served to accompany the regular sized versions of the crayon gifted to attendees.

[The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art]