While living in South Carolina, I lived with 3 other artists in an old shoe factory. Not long after we all moved there, we began passing around an old book I’d purchased from a Salvation Army up the road. Each one of us would alter the interior of the book, a page at a time, until the book was full of work we had all created.

I was also looking a lot at net-based art projects that developed ‘books’ of art, existing only in cyberspace. Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher’s Learning to Love You More, and Frank Warren’s Postsecret* were using the inherently communal aspects of the internet as a means of creating community through making. I wanted to do this as well.

I created a MySpace account under the name Lending Library for the Closet Vandal, and sent out a call to the residents of Spartanburg to become a part of my project. On the site, I created a character who appealed to the ‘closet vandal’ in each one of us, who desired to write, draw or tear out pages of library books. And then provided the means to do so.

I kept a stack of old books in the offices of our workspace, invited interested parties to come ‘check’ out a book, and alter it however they saw fit. It worked, and people made some really wonderful work.

I documented these pages with my digital camera, uploaded the images to my Flickr, and used the built-in blog system of MySpace to share the altered pages with the other participants. Below you can find some of the fruits of their labors. Click on any image to see it larger.

*interestingly enough, both of these websites have now yielded printed and bound books of the uploaded content, for more traditional ‘reading.’