A tree made of books made of trees...

This fabulous tree was created by Tracey from Panopolie for the lobby of the Cameron Village library in Raleigh. She constructed it one evening using books (lots and lots of books!) bamboo poles and clamps. Oh, and a rubber band and some double sided tape.

The first layer is made of folded out old encyclopedias all held together with clamps. Tracey is stacking books on top of the encyclopedias to make the first layer.

Here you can see Tracey folding out an encyclopedia and notice that she has stacked a wooden display cube in the center of the tree. The librarians were fearful that someone would be so stimulated by the beauty of the tree that they might knock it over, so Tracey used the cubes to help anchor the bamboo support poles. I think it would have been fine without the cubes but then I guess the library is a very exciting place.

Here you can see that Tracey has added the bamboo poles (carefully selected from my garden!) and is sliding the books down over the poles. For this layer, books with already broken spines were selected. No books were harmed in the making of this tree-they will be folded out flat after the holidays and you can purchase them at the next Wake County Library Book Sale!

For the finish, Tracey (with my help!) rolled cones of paper and used double-sided tape to stick them into pockets in the tree. This fluffed it out and made the form a bit more natural-looking, if you could say a tree made of old books can be natural looking. Go see this tree, it is really stunning. I will try to post another full length picture of it and some how-to pics of the folds later this week.