this into that

Furniture design sort of baffles me. I understand why people do it; I have even attempted a little bit of it (clearly rudimentary) myself. I lust after meticulously devised couches and clever coat racks. I can have a sense of humor about bookshelves. Still, the whole thing here is a little too House of Paper for me to be comfortable. Too literal.

And then there's this thing that seems to bother people about defacing books. Since I worked in a bookstore and know that books are routinely stripped of their covers and thrown in dumpsters (sorry, public), this sort of reuse doesn't seem like an abuse to me (and certainly not a step down the slippery slope toward National Socialist Book Burning Slumber Parties). If it were a little bit more subtle, I would probably be an advocate.

What do you guys think? Should books only be a design element so long as they remain mutable, available in their "intended" form? Does making a book into something else remove its "intrinsic value"? If you thought of books as something structural rather than something more abstract, something floating in the intellectual ether, how would that change your relationship to the things that you read?