A benign quirk of humanity is that we are delighted by things designed to look like other things. A bed shaped like a swan. A sauna shaped like a garlic bulb. A toilet brush shaped like a cherry. The designer Elsa Schiaparelli made fashion history with her acts of surreal mimicry, creating buttons in the form of crickets, a compact that looks like a rotary phone dial, a belt buckle of manicured hands.
The trick is hardly new. Medieval cooks molded pork meatloaf to look like pea pods and massaged sweet almond paste into hedgehogs. No matter the scale or edibility of the object, we’ve always relished a material plot twist — a one-liner in three dimensions.
Inclusion in the category requires design intention, so the “night stand” that is actually a pile of unread books by your bed doesn’t count, no matter how nicely it accommodates a pair of reading glasses and a jar of melatonin gummies. But how about a transistor radio painstakingly designed to mimic a leather-bound book? Or a hand-held lantern shaped like an open volume, complete with marbled exterior and gilt-stamped spine? Or a tiny dust-jacketed “book” with a functional cigarette lighter where the pages ought to be? Yes, yes and yes.
The above are three of roughly 70 objects on display in “The Best Kept Secret: 200 Years of Blooks,” a show at the Center for Book Arts in New York running through May 10. “Blook” is a contraction of “book-look,” according to the curator of the show, Mindell Dubansky, from whose collection most of the items are drawn. Much like a book itself, the enchanting exhibit packs a lot into a space of modest dimensions.
The relics are divided into categories including “Remembrance & Commemoration,” “Faith & Religion” and “Love & Friendship.” Cards attending each object do more than identify a date and a provenance; they brim with ebullient detail. Did you know, for example, that book-shaped love tokens were crafted by 19th-century lumbermen in the logging regions of the United States and Canada? And that the boxes were filled with raw spruce gum, which is apparently a substance that every young lady would have been ecstatic to receive? And — now we move into the zone of entreaty — why oh why has this form of vernacular art faded into oblivion, when it’s so clear that anyone’s heart would melt at receiving an intricately carved faux book constructed from a single piece of wood and featuring slide lids at both ends? Lumberjacks: The ball is in your court.
Instead of conveying affection, a blook may transmit contraband. A book-shaped lunchbox from 1874 includes a flask that glides snugly into the box’s “spine” — the flask sized to hold liquor sufficient for intoxicating two grown men or at least six children. A daintier perspective on drinking can be inferred from a stack of 18th-century blooks that opens to reveal a carafe of liquor and four gilt-rimmed glasses.
With its plain cover and brown trade binding, “Milady’s Fancy Vol. XVII” looks like a slog. Open it and you’ll find a 14-piece vanity set nestled in grass-green silk, complete with manicure tools and an embedded mirror. The concretely excellent craftsmanship of the set — each celluloid comb and file held in place by a sewn ribbon — stands in contrast to the nebulous rationale for its existence. What situation might require a lady to smuggle a salon’s worth of beauty tools inside a book? Date night at the public library?
So far we’ve seen blooks deployed in the service of lust, gluttony and pride. That’s three of the seven deadly sins. Next up: wrath.
The “Chef-an-ette” was a container for recipe cards designed to imitate a shelf of books, with compartments cheekily titled “Cakes Cookies Doughnuts: Vol. 2” and “Candies Fritters Sandwiches: Vol. 6.” The Chef-an-ette on view is from the 1950s and still contains its original recipe cards. In a curatorial note, Dubansky explains that a startling item was unearthed among the cards: an anonymous letter admonishing the cook, a Mrs. Schultz, for alleged inappropriate conduct.
That letter is affixed to the gallery wall for visitors to read. “You make your own laws concerning your love and dealings with your fellow men, don’t you Mrs. Schultz?” the letter-writer seethes. “The old Bible admonition ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ does not apply to you does it Mrs. Schultz?” It is signed “A interested party.” Little did the unnamed writer know that the “interested party” would expand to include hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of 21st-century gallerygoers.
The mischief continues with an exploding book from the early 20th century. The fad for so-called “loud books” has, mercifully, abated — but around the time of World War I an unsuspecting bookworm may have opened a gift to receive a heart-stopping CRACK! instead of a tranquil reading experience.
Objects from the past may alienate us from our ancestors just as often as they connect us. This was true of several lighters disguised as books, with flame-producing mechanisms tucked into a spine or pivoting out from a corner. I tried to imagine myself into the position of a smoker who so intensely fantasized about using a book as ignition that he or she was moved to commission a pansy-ornamented copper-and-brass book-shaped lighter engraved with an alligator-skin pattern. I failed. It doesn’t matter; the result is pretty enough to justify itself.
All manner of toys and games have been disguised as books. A James Bond-inspired fad for espionage toys in the 1960s led to the invention of Secret Sam’s Spy Dictionary, an “exciting secret weapon” featuring a 16-exposure camera with a lens peeking out of a hole in an index tab. The book also shoots plastic bullets and features a mirror for observing enemies. Parents: Fire up your eBay alerts now and you might snag one in time for Christmas 2025.
More nefarious, though equally alluring, is a book-shaped trick box. A user who attempted to open this “book” would have been attacked by a wooden snake contrived to pop out and pierce its victim’s hand. If you wanted to condition a youngster out of the desire to read you might provide them with this evil device at an impressionable age.
What drives people to create and crave objects that emulate books? For one thing, books have an aura of mystery. One is meant to be alone with a book; it is a technology that neither demands a crowd nor benefits from one. The privacy of reading goes a way toward defining the allure of the vessel and the temptation to repurpose it. It may explain why there is no blook equivalent in the form of a Blu-ray DVD case or television set.
The urge may also be a simple matter of blook-makers wanting to capture and recreate that which is beautiful — an act no different from drawing a flower or painting a sunrise.
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