The Dissected Manuscript

There are billions of stories that have been told in all of humanity and so there are a few that can be safely forgotten. Take a tour through a thrift store and you'll find hundreds of old hardcover books that are just begging to find a new life. Their intent, if they can have one, is to be read, but let's liberate them into something new. A phoenix from the ashes, if you will.

In memory of the surrealists who cut up pieces of text out of newspapers or books to create new narratives with horrendous plots I decided to take a tawdry novel and open it up to a vast realm of new possibilities. With the pages sliced up you can rearrange the tale of kids drinking, drugging and screwing. Go straight from the psychiatrist couch into a heroin binge and then into a fight with the disconnected parents. Only faster this time.

Or you could just accept this as an aesthetic exercise to see what you can create with a budget of $5 and a rainy afternoon to kill.

The main ingredient here is a great book. You can define greatness in your own way as that is a purely objective decision. Jackie Collins lives in my city and so I figured that she would be the perfect author to have her work destroyed. She's made millions and I really doubt that she'll be offended. It also happened to be the first book of the right size that I came across. And then I came up with some rationalization so that makes me happy enough.

The other qualities of greatness would relate to the thickness of the paper and the width of the pages. I've done a couple of other versions of this with a big thesaurus and the feel of the paper was better. I didn't feel bad about that as I don't believe in synonyms and any excuse to take those out of circulation is good in my opinion.

In addition to the book, get a pencil, an X-Acto with fresh blades, and a ruler.

Choose how thick you want the slices and mark out the increments with a pencil. Do this on the outside and the inside as a guide for the cutting.

Use the ruler to guide the initial slicing and you can then use the cut pages to guide the rest of the cuts. Be careful to keep the lines straight as the pages can shift and it's easy to slice off thin ribbons of paper.

Move from cutting line to cutting line and go through the book. Iterate, iterate, iterate.

With the whole book cut up, grab each section and alternate direction. Half go one way and the other half go the other way. Hold it down with your hand so it doesn't flop back into the middle.

Plop some magazines down on top of the book to keep it in place. Now get out some ridiculously large design book that you got at the store on an impulse because it had some rad pictures and it was on sale and damn if that cover isn't trippy.

Sweet, you're done and now the book needs some nice place to be appreciated. In my apartment, this means that I get to put it on a table for a couple weeks before my girlfriend gets sick of it and I have to give it away or shove it closed and stick into one of several storage piles that we have.

Close peeks at the book reveal several bits of random salaciousness to enjoy. Lust and greed and overdoses, this book has it all.

Now that the sun is out it's time to get outside for a run or a bike ride. Time to let the subconscious think of other projects or variations to do.

Other ideas:

- One single cut per page that moves from the top to the bottom as the pages progress, creating one big diagonal slice.
- Curved lines
- Leaf design cut out on each page so that a leaf flops out on one side and the negative space flops on the other.
- Two cuts per page that start out next to each other at the middle of the first page and move outwards as the pages progress, creating a mountain on one side and a valley on the other.