Marc Berenson sent us some snaps of magazine wallpaper he spotted at Steiner Studios at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The subject line read: I thought you might have an opinion on this homemade wallpaper from old magazine pages, it’s improvised
For sure we have an opinion: Although it kinda works in a public stairwell with that cobalt blue, we aren’t crazy about it since it’s so busy and we get addled by a lot of words and the pages don’t seem terribly well edited, and why look at commercial stuff? BUT…
WE LOVE THE IDEA!!!!
Lots of possibilities there. We know from our friend Pamela Hovland’s magazine page envelopes and Carol McDonnell’s magazine wrapping paper that that there are some wondrous images to be culled for free…
This wallpaper made from magazine spines makes for calmer graphics (but a pain in the but to do):
We’ve found the pages of certain books to be pretty compelling:
What do you think?
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You are right–the magazine stairwell is really busy and, to my eye, bordering on the dizzily chaotic. I think that application would have been more successful had it been more squarely oriented, as in the example of using leaves from a book for wallpaper.
The comment I really want to add here is a reminder that old newspaper was for a long time the standard “go to” wallpaper for rural America. Not only did it cover roughhewn wood slat walls, it also offered a modicum of insulation (not to mention the earliest form of recycling newspaper I know).