These Gorgeous Quilts are Made from Discarded Books

“Lexigons,” a BiblioQuilt by Maine artist Larry Clifford. Photography courtesy of Larry Clifford

Marie Kondo made a splash with her 2011 book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, even igniting a minor controversy when people misconstrued her advice to believe a tidy person should only keep thirty books. So when Maine artist Larry Clifford amassed thousands of books in his garage, it was time for a creative intervention.

“My wife got to the point during COVID when she said, ‘You need to do something with these,’” he says.

With a background in biomedical illustration, Clifford was familiar with surgical interventions and precise artistic pursuits.

Artist Larry Clifford. Photography courtesy of Larry Clifford

“I worked mostly in traditional media, and then lost interest when everything became computer-generated,” Clifford says. He pivoted to another detail-oriented career — grant writing for nonprofits. When his wife urged him to sift through the thousands of volumes in the house, he recognized they possessed little market value, but his great interest in the material prevented him from discarding them.

Sorting through their colors and patterns, he saw a new canvas and was delighted to use time during the pandemic to pursue fine art again. 

While deconstructing a book may be a bibliophile’s nightmare — Clifford himself says “it’s a painful process for someone who loves books” — he takes immense care to create his signature BiblioQuilts, square boards that take their geometric patterns from hand-cut book covers and spines.

“These aren’t books anyone has read for decades,” he says. “My goal in the next year or so is to recycle the pages and use that paper in some of this work as well. I try not to let anything go to waste.”

His commitment to salvaging books in their entirety has yielded gorgeous results. He crafts geometric patterns that harken back to the traditional sewn quilts that inspired him and has found an audience in exhibiting throughout New England.

“I try to make sure that each piece has some characteristics that show that it comes from a book,” he says. “I’ve never been specific about the exact words.

“Although I have had people sit in front of my work for several minutes,” he adds. “I had one gentleman say, ‘I’m intrigued with where these books came from. Clearly, the source material was about World War I battles, and my grandfather fought in many of these battles.’”

Clifford sometimes uses sheet music, and a professional musician in Manhattan bought a particular four-foot by four-foot piece.

“Horatio II.” Author Doris Kearns Goodwin owns its corresponding piece, “Horatio I.” Photography courtesy of Larry Clifford

“She said she and her friends were going to get together and, with these little squares, try to figure out what the original composition was,” Clifford says.

For the book quilt-curious, Clifford will exhibit a series of quilts at the Barrington Public Library in May and the Westerly Library in June. The shows include pieces named for New England states and a Rhode Island quilt that incorporates books he sourced from Bay State Book Company in North Smithfield. He’ll give a demonstration during his Westerly show, and he notes that he typically comes away from these shows with more books from folks who are interested to see what he’ll make of them.

And as for the Cliffords’ book collection, the problem of quantity persists.

“All the covers are piled up and sorted by color. The book spines are stored in bins, and the pages are in another part of my studio,” he says. “So, fewer books, but most of the material still exists, and it continues to grow.”

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Clifford’s BiblioQuilts will be on display at the Barrington Public Library from May 1–29, and at the Westerly Public Library from May 30–June 26. Clifford will give a demonstration at the Westerly Library on May 30 at 1 p.m.