I love the experimental nature Jonathan Safran Foer is taking with his books. I read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close recently and enjoyed the visual writing that accompanied the story. I was very happy to find that one of my presents this Christmas was his new book, Tree of Codes. Here, he chose to use The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. From this text, a new story was drawn from it using the die-cut technique. The title itself comes from the original title with a few letters cut out.
I have not started reading Tree of Codes yet as I want to save the experience, the journey of leafing through the cut pages for a nice afternoon in. Apparently with so much text cut out, it takes about half an hour to read the book.
The sculptural nature of the book reminded me of one of the V&A Friday Lates night that I went to about a year ago where there was a bank of books that you could pick up and experiment with using pen, scissors and glue. It was a fun night of giving a new lease to old books.
Come On Closer 