Brian Dettmer, a New York-based artist known as the Book Surgeon, uses tweezers, knives, scalpels, and other surgical tools to dissect and carve old books into intricate and beautiful sculptures.
Dettmer's paper art has a sort of old-school touch to it because he uses vintage books – maps, encyclopedias, textbooks, manuals, and any other sort of literature that he can turn into an interesting work of art.
Although his creative process does end up destroying (or adding to, depending on how you look at it) someone else's unique artwork, Dettmer has a different take on it; “My work is a collaboration with the existing material and its past creators and the completed sculpture art pieces expose new relationships of the book’s internal elements exactly where they have been since their original conception.”
