Stacked Book Portraits

Mr. Stilkey wants to make sure you do exactly what people have told you not to do to literature: judge a book by its cover. In that case, the words contained within these Mike Stilkey Book Sculptures must be some of the most brilliant ever written.

The Los Angeles-based artist glues old books together and paints beautiful murals over their spines using a combination of pencils and acrylic paint.

The Mike Stilkey Book Sculptures feature images with accentuated Gothic features reminiscent of the characters in Tim Burton films. If a picture is worth a thousand words then a Mike Stilkey piece is worth about 2 million.