Here’s What Happens When Bookstore Employees Get Bored

Check out the folks at Librairie Mollat, a bookstore in Bordeaux, France, where a book cover can apparently double as a new face. Their photos line up covers with customers and employees so the printed picture seems to continue right into the person holding it. Finally, a sensible reason to judge a book by its cover.

The trick is called bookface. Hold a cover in front of someone, match the angle and proportions, and let the real person finish what the illustration or photograph started. Simple enough to explain. Getting everything to line up? That’s where things get ridiculous.

How Mollat Makes Its Bookfaces

There is more going on here than somebody hiding behind a paperback. A matching hairstyle or the right clothes can make the edge of the book almost disappear. Your brain sees a person; then it notices the rectangle. Then you have to look again.

In a May 2019 interview with Les Liseuses de Bordeaux, Mollat’s fine arts bookseller David Pigeret explained that he and a colleague had borrowed the idea from sleevefaces, the same visual game played with vinyl record covers. They initially made the pictures for their own amusement, then brought them to the bookstore’s Instagram account when it launched in 2013.

Pigeret said they took the photos with an iPad, finding promising covers among new arrivals and older books. They sometimes planned clothing and looked for someone with a suitable hairstyle. He described using Instagram’s adjustments rather than Photoshop or a studio setup. So yes, finding the right head was part of the job.

A Paperback Worth a Second Look

By August 2017, Mollat was giving the pictures a much bigger stage. The bookstore’s own website described a display of enlarged bookfaces in its windows, along with a weekly Monday Instagram series featuring its booksellers. A perfectly respectable excuse to stop in front of a shop window and stare at somebody’s borrowed face.

You can browse the bookstore’s Instagram for more of these cover-and-human combinations. Fair warning: this is the sort of thing you open for a quick look and keep scrolling through while your actual reading sits untouched.

Man, I could look at this kinda thing all day. Annnnnnd I probably will, TBH. Productivity be damned!

Via: Bored Panda.