Flyleaves Are My Flygirls: Making Rotting Paper Dance

New paper has little personality. There’s something uninteresting about a pristine piece of paper. It’s like a face without any discernible scars. There’s no life to a brand-new piece of paper. No story. No history.

Ever since I started making collages in a pop-Schwitters style (just thought of that, seems on point) I’ve looked out for old pieces of paper. When everyone has access to the same materials the creations end up looking similar. I’m not a collage maker that does intricate cuts or peculiar shapes; I mostly work with rectangles or squares where all the images touch one another. For me, making collages like this, with new and vibrant paper, the senses get overloaded. Too many new colors make the collage look like a high school project. You know, one of those ice breaker activities meant to introduce someone’s animated personality. Look, over there is Kelly Kopawski and beside her is an image of my favorite chip, Pizzarias.

Over time I’ve focused on flyleaves. Flyleaves (also called front-free-endpages) are the blank pages of a book that normally come directly before a title page. I find my flyleaves in the giant free bins at my local bookstore. I go there every week and tear out the flyleaves, as many as I possibly can. Sometimes you get two or three “blank” pages with every book since they’re at the start and at the end. I take the pages I want and toss the rest of the book back into the bin. Catch and release. Since I’m not really looking for content, it doesn’t matter what the focus of the book is. I simply dig around for books that look old. The condition is unimportant too. Because I’m looking for discarded trash, I can leave the bookstore with twenty or more pages that’s eventually going to end up in a landfill or a hoarder’s paradise if I don’t take them. Flyleaves from long forgotten 19^th century novels, weird encyclopedias, and hate-filled religious texts end up walking out the doors with me.

Time is what makes these pages unique.

There’s something beautiful about a book that has been in a poorly ventilated basement for fifty years, a book riddled with water damage, a book that held up the end of a cheap couch since Eisenhower was in office. The pages have dents and ruts and rot and mold. Art supply stores seem leery of mold and rot and that weird smell that old books get. If it doesn’t smell, I don’t want it. They always smell. My car smells. If the good people at Jovan Musk started making a fragrance called bibliosmia, I’d buy it.

Although almost all these pages start out white, time changes them in unique ways. Some paper is thicker than others which causes unique changes compared to very thin, newspaper-like papers. Things yellow in different ways and at different intervals. Texture is important. Paper from books printed in other countries will have a different feeling than from cheap books published in the US. There are bumps in paper and cuts. Whenever I finish a collage, I go over it with sandpaper. Doing this brings the composition together. All that paper mixed and cut and reassembled, some from a book published in 1897, some from Soviet-era guidebook, and some from cheap pulp novels, react in contrast to one another. The paper is essentially the same color, but on closer inspection there are tiny inconsistencies that come out. If you’re willing to look closely, you can see how all of it clashes into a new thing.

Can you smell it?

I’ve broken the most common types of flyleaves into four different categories. I did this for you.

Blank

The most common type of flyleaves are the blank ones. These are the ones that people have not really touched. They have the least personality but make up the bulk of the pages I rip from books. Although blank, that does not mean the paper hasn’t picked up a lot of “personality” from the time it was first printed. Oxidation is key. 

  

Distressed

This one is my favorite. Distressed flyleaves are truly the most idiosyncratic of them all. Look at this page, right here, there’s a long strip of yellowing on the right side. This takes time, decades and with little interference from other people. You can’t buy this piece of paper new. Dead center, both at the bottom and at the top, you can see where a piece of tape has corroded the page. Paper clips are also common, so are pieces of cut-out bits that have been stuck inside as a bookmark. When the piece of paper sits in there for decades, it makes a permanent impression on the paper. 

 

Scribbles

Scribbles are most found in textbooks or books that kids like to mess around with. Kids draw in books, they make notes, and so often they practice writing their names. There are more than a few textbooks I’ve found filled with long lists of a child’s name slightly different from the example above. It’s like they’re practicing signing autographs at an awards show. Scribbles done in pencil always look the best. Over time the marks smudge, and move, giving the handwriting a ghostly quality. 

 

Library

Although libraries purport to care the most about books, you can always tell a library book from a non-library book. Libraries like dropping in fun little stickers with the name of the library or the type of book, or those ugly barcodes. Often these books are discarded and sold at library sales, a major source of my joy. I always pull out any page that has the word “DISCARD” on it. Sometimes this is written and sometimes it’s rubberstamped. Sometimes you get “WITHDRAWN”, but I don’t like that word as much, too long. None of these marks matter when compared to best of library defacement, the “DUE BACK” stamp. Nothing is more beautiful than this. I can look at these all day long, whether they’re lovingly rendered in a straight line or presented sloppily like they are here. Whenever I get a beautiful due back page, I always look at the dates to see how loved the book was. This one was loved. 

 

Find, rip, cut, reassemble, mail.