Like the London fog that shrouds everything in a Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, objects found in The Black Spot Books are touched with the marks of antiquity and care. Margaux Kent, the founder of this shop describes her penchant for materials with a history, explaining that she likes to work with “treasures found and recovered from misfortune and neglect, relics of the unusual, the confused and the macabre, cut and pulled and bound into wearable curiosities and inscribable keepsakes.”
The hand-bound book receives new life in the hands of this Philadelphia-based artist in more ways than one. Lined with hand-torn and individually stitched pages, the uniquely tactile journals and notebooks are also produced in miniature as petite charms and utilitarian necklaces. The components for these books come from myriad sources: “The leather I use has been bartered from farms in Ecuador, ripped from old chairs in Holland, taken from boots and shoes and saddles and bags and wallets, and found in abandoned houses across the United States,” says Kent. This practice not only adds a nostalgic mystique to these items, but makes them both green and animal-friendly.
In addition, this shop offers an assortment of found and vintage objects crafted into delicate jewelry, Victorian curiosities and intriguing prints and photographs.
To learn more about The Black Spot Books or to purchase items from this Etsy shop, please visit:
Also, please visit this shop on Twitter, Facebook and Blogspot:
http://twitter.com/TheBlackSpotBks
http://www.facebook.com/people/Margaux-Kent/1347784159
(Images from Top: Autumnal Library 11 antique and scrap leather books for the neck black walnut, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, crimson, sap green and soot; The Jellyfish 1885 Victorian etching journal covered in vintage deerskin; The Hester Pryne Necklace. All images courtesy of The Black Spot Books.)
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