For Book Lovers

As a total book lover, when I stumbled across Jane Mount and her work for her ongoing project "Ideal Bookshelf" earlier this week I knew I immediately wanted to share it with all of you since I know many of you love books as much as I do.

Long story short, Jane paints a set of books in the form of portraiture and the best part is you can custom order a painting. All you have to do is send her a picture of the spines of the books you want and she does the rest (more details and pricing here). We all have favourite books and books that have influenced and perhaps even help shaped who we are and what we do - I think this is a nice way to highlight those books and I find Jane's work completely charming.

I love books and love looking on other people's bookshelves to see what books they've read and are into. I think you can tell so much about someone by the books they read and choose to display. I proudly have many of my books out on shelves and kind of don't understand when some people choose to cover their book covers with plain craft paper or something else of that nature for a uniform look. The book covers are part of the charm! You know when you see a book spine and just from the colour or little bit of the image you can see or the font - and you can immediately know what book it is? Why would you want to cover it? Crazy.

Even though I'm in the midst of packing up all of my stuff and moving it into storage I already know I'll be ordering one for myself. My first peace of real art - and custom to boot! I'm already having fun thinking about what books I want to include and think it will be a mix of my all-time favourites (Roots, A Thousand Splendid Suns) with some fun ones that I just enjoy (The Know It All and The Year of Living Biblically (both by AJ Jacobs) had me in stitches I laughed so hard). I think I'd also include some books I've read more recently that have helped shape my thinking (Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, Who Will Cry When You Die?) Hmmm......I really need to start a little list! I think this would make a great gift for book lovers, or for a nursery/child's room - you could have all of your favourite childhood books painted! Or maybe one for the kitchen with all of your favourite cookbooks?

You can find out more by visiting Jane's site or checking out her Etsy shop where you can purchase ready made pieces.

+All images above from Jane Mount's website & Etsy shop.

+Here is a great article by The National Post on Jane and her work.

(Just in case there is any doubt this NOT a sponsored post. I haven't ever done one of those. I came across Jane's work, loved it, and wanted to share. Simple as that :)

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Speaking of books and book covers (can you see where I'm going with this?) one of my favourite bloggers Anna of the popular blog Door Sixteen has, what I think, one of the coolest jobs around - she's a book cover designer! I know right?! She doesn't usually talk too much about her job on her blog but earlier this week she posted an Ask Anna: Book Cover Edition post and well - I think she got close to 100 questions...and she's started to answer them! I find it really interesting to learn more about what people do and in this case I love hearing about her job which totally sounds like a dream job to me. So if you're interested in learning more about what goes into making those awesome book covers that catch your eye, that you can't forget, and that help you to hand over your cash (because lets face it, we DO judge a book by it's cover) be sure to check out Anna's posts.

Happy reading! Have a great weekend :)