Rain in Ragtime

Rita's Ragtime Rain Raged,
a Purgatory of Rags & Rafters

ragtime: syncopated American popular music

Was is reading Farenheit 451 at a tender age that engendered my loathing for the destruction of books? Or is it something that was engrained in a non-internet generation? I went to Half-Price Books determined to find a book worthy of mutilation and settled on a sturdy compact dictionary published in 1978. It has a hard cover and the signatures seem to be nicely sewn together. I spent part of last weekend methodically ripping out pages according to the method set down by Lisa Vollrath on her web page.

You can see my dictionary after I tore out about half the pages. It turned out just Lisa’s book and I have a stack of pages full of word definitions I can use for many projects. The book seemed to fall open naturally to the letter “R” so I dedicated the two facing pages to Hurricane Rita. I found a number of words that I tied together into sentences and gessoed out the rest. Then I started glueing, stamping, and coloring. I think it has a ways to go before it’s done.

I think I’ll call this book “word play.”