Book du jour - reusing a dictionary

Needing a book without pages - just a cover and spine - I took most of the pages out of an old school dictionary. (More about that later, perhaps.)

While I was tearing them out, one by one, the headwords continually caught my eye. My first attempt at recycling the dictionary words uses the page TIGRESS to TITAN. The words look a little lonely on the page, a little purposeless without their definitions. The cut-up page is not without interest, though...

To stick the words onto the page - they are tiny! - I sprayed the back of the dictionary page with 505 (repositionable) spray, then cut them with a scalpel and lifted them into place with the tip. The sheet of paper had been scored with parallel lines to help placement.

Rather than doing more "big pages" like this, I'll fold them in half and do a dozen or so to make a "proper book". My original plan came from the "line as text" idea, and was to sew through the middle of the words with fine thread to hold them on the page. That might be tricky with words on both sides of the page, as I envisaged when thinking of a "proper book" ... but having the words just on the right-hand page means that the left-hand page really would have "lines as text".

(Two days later....) The words are glued onto graph paper, which makes it easier to align and position them. One dictionary page fits onto one graph-paper page -

The temporary adhesive is not to be trusted, so, using the finest thread I had, and bobbin thread to match the graph paper, I ran a line of machine-stitching through the lines of words -

The stitching makes them almost illegible - is it some kind of subconscious erasure? And ... what to do with the thread ends, to keep them out of sight?

They tend to cling to each other when brushed into the middle - hence the title of the book - Combing the Alphabet -

It comes in a plain brown wrapper.