There’s something magic about cutting things out. Getting rid of things you don’t need, things that don’t add anything to your life. Jurgen Faulstick, who lives between Cork and India – believes that “Decluttering – will revolutionise your life” I’m sure this is true, and I do try it every now and again…

This is a post about Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book called Tree of Codes I loved Foer’s 9/11 tale Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. But that will not prepare you for Tree of Codes. This is no ordinary book. What Foer has done – and I’ve never heard of anything like this before. He took his favourite book – Bruno Schultz’s The Street Of Crocodiles and cut it up.

He took the title, Street of Crocodiles and cut out 7 letters and got Tree of Codes. Then he took the whole book and cut it back, taking most of the words off each page and somehow by doing this he found his own story within Schulz’s original story. He made a new story.

To be able to do all of this, and what Vanity Fair called “very, very cool”, Foer needed a very patient “boutique” publisher, amazing die-cut experts and then some company that would hand finish the book to produce this “piece of sculpture“. Seeing is believing so watch the video.

One is a promotional video where Foer explains his reasons and the other is the making of the book. My grandfather and my father had a printing works – and we were all in and out of “the works” as kids – so I think this video is beautiful.

And if you still want more – I did – just google like a mad thing.