Angela Salvo Reflection

The process of altering a book, a textbook to be more precise, ended up being much more fun and satisfying than I could have expected. The book I chose was my public speaking textbook from last year spring semester. The reason that this book means enough to me to alter it is that taking that public speaking course was a huge leap out of my comfort zone and to me it represents a step in the right direction towards a more competent and confident version of myself. The class was an interesting experience for me, and at times I just plain wanted to give up entirely, so the fact that I made it through the class successfully made it a worthwhile experience. Therefore, transforming this book was a good choice for me for this assignment.

To begin, I wasn’t really sure what to do to the book. My initial thoughts were to simply go through it and cut some pages up, paint some pages, maybe soak a few pages, burn a page, and see where the process took me. My housemate gave me the idea to cut the entire book into the shape of a circle, and that intrigued me. So to accomplish that I started by rounding off the two corners that weren’t attached to the binding edge. To achieve this look I used the x-acto knife from our art supply pack. I drew a curved line to give myself a guide of where to cut the pages. As I continued, I found it easy at first but more difficult trying to keep it perfectly lined up as I cut more and more of the book. By the time I finished rounding off the first corner, my arm was starting to hurt, but I was getting the hang of how to best achieve the curved line I was going for. When I began the bottom corner, I took a chunk of pages at a time and put only that chunk of pages down against the cutting surface. This was easier but the end result ended up giving a sloped edge to the pages as the top pages were cut slightly further in then the bottom pages, but I liked the effect so I went with it. Then I began to consider whether or not making the book completely round was realistic. Looking at what I had so far, I realized that cutting a triangle out from the middle would look like a mouth and thus make my book as a whole resemble Pac-Man. Once this process was complete, I needed to decide how to alter the cover and binding edge to look like Pac-man which made me chose painting, and to make it into Ms. Pac-Man instead.

My next step was to paint. Since the cover was shiny I knew that the gouache would not cover it entirely without many, many coats of paint. Therefore, I tore a blank page from the end of the book and used the adhesive from our art supply pack to paste the page onto the cover of the book. Once that dried mostly, I painted the cover yellow using multiple coats, painted red lips, a red bow, and a black curved line as a closed eye, with eyelashes. This was my own interpretation of the classic Ms. Pac-Man representation, as I added eyelashes and painted the lips slightly differently. Once this dried, it formed a curved shape which I hadn’t anticipated but I think adds some aesthetic interest. To make the binding yellow as well, I cut a strip of construction paper and glued it to the edge.

Then I wanted to add something to the inside of the book. At first I simply sprayed some perfume on one of the middle pages, to relate to perfume advertisements in magazines. Next I decided to take out my x-acto knife again and create a hole in the middle to represent Ms. Pac-Man’s stomach. I used the pieces of paper that came out of that hole and crumpled them into little balls. These are intended to represent the circles of “food” that Ms. Pac-Man eats when you play the video game.

Drawing from the reading, “Preliminaries: The Introduction of Paper into Europe,” I found the description of exactly how paper is made to be very interesting. From the raw material being old rags, to the fact that there were “specialized dealers,” to the sorting process, I had no idea exactly how much work went into it. The steeping of the rags, chopping of the rags, and leaving the material in cellars to ferment seems very involved and specific. I did however recognize the use of the term “reams” when referring to stacks of paper, as I work in the Information Center here at Bryant where I handle a lot of paper as I refill the printer each work shift.

The actual definition of paper, found in the reading, “Before Paper,” is, “a substance made in the form of thin sheets or leaves from rags, straw, bark, wood, or other fibrous material, for various uses.” This makes sense to me but based on all the other ways that paper, although some processes do not result in “true paper” has been made makes me consider this definition rather limited. Also from this reading I found it intriguing just how much paper is produced for each individual of the population in the United States (287.5 pounds in 1943). Related to this is that the previously stated “fact” that, “the civilization of a country may be determined by the amount of paper consumed,” although this is not really true anymore due to the large quantities of paper used in the U.S. for, “industrial and utilitarian purposes,” which doesn’t relate at all to the use of paper in printing books and for writing purposes.



Lastly, in the reading, “Common Bond,” I found the list of surfaces that have been used for writing over the course of history to be interesting, as it included, “stone, cured animal skins, woven cloth, flattened metal sheets, peeled tree bark, dried animal bones, seashells, and shards of pottery,” amongst many others. Overall, I found parts of the readings to be eye-opening and greatly enjoyed the process of altering my book, as well as the end result.