Can you guess which iconic buildings are recreated using books and other everyday objects in this clever video by Luis Urculo?

Hit play or go to Link [vimeo] - via Fast Company

“This…cat may be an internet sensation, but he knows how to keep his celebrity status from going to his fluffy head…mostly…See all his favorite hiding places—trash cans, cupboards, cereal boxes…if it’s cozy, he’s there—meet his treasured toys, and learn what it means to wield just the right amount of cat-titude.”

I am Maru will be available August 23, 2011, but if you can’t wait until then, his blog of the same name updates frequently.

Link

9-year-old Jamie shares a top-floor apartment on New York's Fifth Avenue with his parents and three siblings. The family's two other homes are in Spain and the Hamptons.

14-year-old Prena is a domestic worker in Nepal and lives in a cell-like room in the attic of the house where she works in Katmandu.

Kenyan-born, English-raised, Venice-based documentary photographer James Mollison’s photographs of children and their sleeping arrangements highlights the shocking disparity between the living conditions of children from all over the world. From Fifth Avenue to Katmandu, Mollison’s book, Where Children Sleep, was written and designed as an empathy tool for 9-to-13-year-olds to better understand the lives of other children around the world. Link

Books make for great decorative touches around the house, no doubt. But as the Kindle Uprising advances, fewer and fewer print books are being sold and, hey, maybe someday you’ll need a great title to slip under the side table lamp and there will be no book. For this highly unlikely situation, Italian artist Emanuela Ligabue has you covered. Her collection of wooden-blocks-turned-books is kind of quirky and interesting, though I confess that I’d paint my own fake books before buying one. Check out more of Ligabue’s designs on Flavorpill. Link

Image: Emanuela Ligabue

(Watch on Vimeo)

Sure, just about everyone who reads has a book light. But do you have a light made of a book? Don’t be sad; neither do I… yet. This video shows the process (rather quickly) on how to build your own cool lamp. For the tutorial, check out Grathio Labs. Link

via Make Online

Combine your love of books and art into one very cool poster: Postertext lets you "hang" your favorite book on the wall as a poster. The clever poster takes a book’s text (yes, you can read the book that way if you want!) and arrange the whitespace to depict a memorable scene from the book.

It’s the perfect gift for your fellow book lovers. Check out NeatoShop‘s selection of Postertext posters: Link | Official website

What Every Man Thinks About Apart From Sex is a groundbreaking work by comedian Sheridan Simove. Sales of his book has recently eclipsed a Harry Potter title and Dan Brown’s "The Da Vinci Code," so he must be on to something!

Sheridan reveals the book in its full glory in this YouTube clip after the jump:

(also blank)

We’ve posted about the World’s Most Unusual Christmas Trees before on Neatorama, but this one made by the folks over at Juniper Books is my current favorite:

Our estimate is that there close to 800 books that make up the Christmas Tree! You can’t really see it from the photos, but we lit the tree from the inside, so it was glowing nicely through the spaces in the books.

Link – via NOTCOT

Perhaps you can’t judge a book by its cover, but Dan Wilbur of Better Book Titles can. Here’s how he decided to "improve" the covers of some very well known books:

This page is for people who have trouble slogging through the information on book jackets or feel intimidated by the title and cover itself. How many times have you perused the cover of a novel only to rub your sore eyes and realize you’ve learned NOTHING from the book’s title?!

This blog is for people who do not have thousands of hours to read book reviews or blurbs or first sentences. I will cut through all the cryptic crap, and give you the meat of the story in one condensed image. Now you can read the greatest literary works of all time in merely seconds!

Link – via metafilter

Here’s another study linking the importance of reading books (technically, book collection – but I suppose the two typically go hand in hand) to academic success:

After examining statistics from 27 nations, a group of researchers found the presence of book-lined shelves in the home — and the intellectual environment those volumes reflect — gives children an enormous advantage in school.

“Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents’ education, father’s occupational status and other family background characteristics,” reports the study, recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. “Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books.

“This is a large effect, both absolutely and in comparison with other influences on education,” adds the research team, led by University of Nevada sociologist M.D.R. Evans. “A child from a family rich in books is 19 percentage points more likely to complete university than a comparable child growing up without a home library.”

Link

Recession? What recession? Edgar Allan Poe’s first book, "Tamerlane and Other Poems," has been sold at auction for a record price of $662,500:

"This is known as the black tulip of U.S. literature," said Francis Wahlgren, head of books and manuscripts at Christie’s in New York, which expects to get from $500,000 to $700,000 for the book on Friday. To the best of Wahlgren’s recollection, the record is $250,000 for a copy of "Tamerlane" sold at auction nearly two decades ago.

No more than 40 or 50 copies of "Tamerlane" were printed, and only 12 remain. Poe’s name doesn’t even grace the cover of the 40-page book, which is credited to "a Bostonian."

Link

Enter the feminist book for children:

Bring on Jacinta Bunnell’s colouring book Girls Are Not Chicks, published in the UK this week. The New York-based author first had the idea for feminist books for children when reading bedtime stories as a nanny. "I found myself editing the words so as not to pass on a sexist message," she says. "In most children’s books the girls have pretty frocks and bows in their hair, so I would turn it around – call the boys by girls’ names and vice versa."

In the US "anti-princess reading lists" have appeared, pioneered by the websites Mommytracked.com and Bitchmagazine.org. There are now books for three- to eight-year-olds with a specifically feminist agenda: Call me Madame President, Girls Think of Everything, Girls Will Be Boys Will Be Girls.

Viv Groskop of The Guardian has the run down of books that’ll turn your little princesses into Betty Friedans in no time flat: Link

An Israeli woman paid $32,000 for the entire Business Class of an El Al flight to allow her dog (and an accompanying vet) to fly with her. She told reporters any price was worth it to keep her pet free from the stress of cargo travel:

“All that mattered to me was to have my baby with me during the flight so that I can take care of him.”
El Al told the Haaretz newspaper in Israel it had never had such a request before. “But after the lady explained her special relationship with her dog and expressed her willingness to pay extra in order to fly with him, we agreed.”

Link – via boingboing

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by coconutnut.

The largest book in the world is a photo collection entitled Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Kingdom. It measures five feet wide by seven feet long, weighs 133 pounds, and is 122 pages long. It was written by MIT scientist Michael Hawley to raise money for education in that very poor nation. Amazon is currently selling it for $30,000.

Link via Oddee

What would Wikipedia look like if it were printed out as a traditional encyclopedia? Rob Matthews decided to make it his art project: behold, the 5,000 pages of Wikipedia (featured articles only, mind you) in book form: Link
- via Cliff Pickover’s Reality Carnival

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.

"Thursday Jan. 1, 2009  18:20 Rousing from torpor to go to shops then come back and cook good things. Fried things, in all likelihood."

James Bridle decided to collect all his Twitter messages from the past two years and print them up in a hardcover book.  He will make one for you, "if you ask nicely and pay me a lot of money."

Why do such a thing?  Bridle explains, "When Twitter is inevitably replaced by something else, I don’t wan to lose those incidentals, the casual asides, the remarks and responses.  That’s all really.  This seems like a nice way to do it, and I’ll probably do it again in a couple of years."

Link – via izreloaded

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.

A selection of book titles and covers so boring they’re interesting.

I bet Alex has some of those in his library.

“It is easy to spot pretty girls because they have big earrings, fancy dresses and all the jewelry,” he writes in Chapter Three.

“Pretty girls are like cars that need a lot of oil.”

He advises, “The best choice for most boys is a regular girl. Remember, some pretty girls are coldhearted when it comes to boys. Don’t let them get to you.”

He believes the best way to approach a girl is to keep it to a simple “hi.”

“If I say hi and you say hi back, we’re probably off to a good start,” he said.

As for his own love life, he said he is not dating anyone at the moment. “I’m a little too young,” he confessed.

Link to story. Link to Amazon order page. -via Unique Daily

(image credit: Liz Sullivan)

Brian Dettmer creates wonderful works of art by sculpting books! Check out his artwork here: Link – via Random Good Stuff

Other book arts on Neatorama: Nick Jones’ Book Sculptures | Martin Frost’s Fore-edge Painting | Jim Rosenau’s For the Kitchen Bookshelf | Nina Katchadourian’s Sorted Book | Tim Baker’s Ammonite Book