By Jill Vejnoska

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In Gwinnett County lately, people have been beating up on books: Cutting into their covers, ripping up their pages and otherwise transgressing against tomes.

Librarians know all about these attacks.

In fact, they set them up.

“They no longer have a life,” Sue Calbreath, Gwinnett County Library director of Events and Outreach, said about the old volumes entered in the system’s “Altered Book Contest.” “We figured, why not give them a new one?”

What sounds like something straight out of the Kindle edition of “Catch-22” — “We must destroy books in order to save them” — is really just a populist version of an important modern art movement that metro Atlanta is a big part of.

Altered books is a mixed-media discipline in which hardcover or paperback books are transformed into contemporary art. Some artists carve deep into a volume as a form of expression, while others reshape or add onto its exterior.

As its profile has risen, so has criticism of the art form among book purists; yet it draws many more supporters, who, like the artists themselves, say altering a book compels people to look deeper and with renewed appreciation at all books.

Indeed, the timing is either ironic or ideal, depending on how you look at it. The traditional ink-on-paper book format may be starting to fade from the scene, thanks to the combined forces of the Internet and reader attention spans that last about as long as the average tweet. But altered books — which, when done at the highest level, are considered a type of sculpture — have gained entry into the serious art world.

“Lots of galleries are having altered-book shows lately,” said Brian Dettmer, an Atlanta resident and widely acknowledged star of the discipline, which uses older volumes — sometimes beautiful, but more often outdated and slightly broken-down — as material for carving out new, three-dimensional pieces. “It’s trendy precisely because it’s so relevant to what’s happening with printed books right now.”

Dettmer’s larger pieces sell for upward of $20,000. His latest one-man show opens at the MiTO Gallery in Barcelona later this month, and he’s currently featured in the group exhibition, “Substitute Teacher,” at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center through May 16. Dettmer is scheduled to have his first Atlanta solo exhibition at Saltworks Gallery this November. He also was part of “BookMarks,” a well-received show that ran at Gallery Walk in the Terminus 100 building in Buckhead last summer.

Another altered-book artist featured there, Palo Pallas of Birmingham, creates miniature “reading chairs” that literally and figuratively find new uses and meanings for writers’ words. Starting with an opened book that forms the seat, Pallas digs into, reshapes and adds onto its contents in ways that evoke the lives and work of writers like Edith Wharton, Henry David Thoreau and even certain self-help types (a whimsical “Jumping Through Hoops” chair) in entirely new ways. Pallas’ simplest sculptures start at $950 and can cost $3,000 or more for specialized pieces. She’ll definitely have her work cut out with her upcoming project, a reading chair she hopes to sculpt from the pages of “Call Me Ted,” legendary Atlantan Ted Turner’s 2008 autobiography.

“When I first started thinking about him, I thought about his chair looking sort of salesman-ish,” Pallas, who does extensive reading and research on all her subjects, said of the man who has sold the world on everything from 24-hour cable news to bison burgers. “But that’s not all he is. He’s gone through a lot to get to where he is and I have to figure out a way to convey that.”

No less intricate or original than a Pallas “reading chair” was the altered-book version of “Hamlet” recently created by Margot Ecke, who teaches at the Atlanta Printmakers Studio. She rebound an old, battered copy of the Shakespeare classic, inserting red sheets of paper between some pages and cutting away portions of text elsewhere to draw attention to and highlight certain aspects of the character of Ophelia.

“My hope would be that the viewer of altered books would go away and think about the experience of reading,” said Ecke, whose piece, “The Tragedy of Ophelia,” was acquired by the Penrose Library at the University of Denver. “A book is a living object that continues to be read and reread, redefined, remarked upon and reconfigured.”

Altered books’ existence dates to the mid-1960s, when painters began treating old books as canvases to be reshaped and reimagined as something new. But the art form’s origins may be even older than that: 11th-century Italian monks are known to have layered new illustrations and text atop portions of older manuscripts as much for decorative purposes as utilitarian ones.

Many modern-day successful altered-book artists grew up straddling the divide between print and cyberspace.

“Right when I came out of college, the world was non-computer people and computer people, and I was at that age where you’re figuring out what you are as an artist,” said Dettmer, 35. “Most of my work is about loss and the erosion of information that’s currently happening as things become less tangible. What do we do when that whole set of encyclopedias we used to pay $1,000 for and treat with a real sense of honor, no longer have ‘value’ because we can look anything and everything up on the Internet?”

Dettmer’s response — astonishingly layered sculptures he creates by carving into single volumes or that “whole set of encyclopedias” glued together — are as much revelations about the way the human mind discovers and processes information as the books themselves. He may decide to alter one of the old books that line several shelves in his home studio, underneath a neatly organized collection of books-on-tape (“I have so much more time to listen than to actually read,” Dettmer said, shrugging at the irony). He prefers working with nonfiction, ideally reference texts that feature a variety of topics and authors writing in a “generic, voice of authority” tone that almost demands one dig deeper — or not.

Dettmer doesn’t read a book he’s about to alter — recently, they’ve included “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Civilization” by Kenneth Clark — although he may flip through it to come up with a general working concept. After sealing its edges, he begins a sculpting process that he equates with reading a book for the first time, or once again, after a long period of time away from it. In this case, though, an X-Acto blade and tweezers become the physical manifestations of his eyes and brain exploring the text. Page by page, Dettmer carves through the book, removing some things from here, leaving others in there, but never physically relocating any of its contents or introducing outside elements. When he works with a single volume, the finished product still looks like a book from the outside, but what’s inside is multiple layers of cutout photos, graphics and text that seem to jump out at and draw in an observer.

Typical of Dettmer’s three-dimensional sculpture is his altered version of “The New Modern Medical Counselor.” A jumble of phrases — “points of pressure,” “first shock,” “anticipate the comfort” — encased in a diagram of the ear, it seems as much a commentary on the way the ear is designed to work as the way it actually has to absorb so much more medical and health information than ever before.

“We remember and process in fragments, not actual stories,” said Dettmer, whose words carry extra weight now when bits of information fly at us in every direction from Twitter feeds to ATM screens, demanding to be made sense of. “A book is constructed from fragments. I take the book and refragment it, which is kind of truer to how we remember things.”

For book lovers, the notion of cutting into one may feel like poking their own eyes out. Indeed, Rachel McCord of Alpharetta couldn’t quite believe what she was doing when she started disassembling a copy of “Library of Poetry & Song” to enter Gwinnett’s Altered Book contest.

“It had been scotch taped together by the previous owner and if you touched the pages, they literally fell apart,” said McCord, 42, who paid $2 at a used-book sale for the volume with an 1876 copyright date. “Still, it felt kind of funny because I love books. I used to work at a bookstore.”

But the mother of two and amateur collage artist persevered and created “Poems of Spring,” a clever garden scene set inside the opened book. Its inside cover was dotted with poetry stanzas carefully culled from the crumbling text. McCord fashioned a small bench and tree out of live twigs; the latter featured leaves that, upon closer inspection, also turned out to be made from poetry-covered pieces of the pages.

“I liked the thought that this book was blossoming again,” McCord said about her first attempt at an Altered Book. “I tried to think of everything I could do to give this book another life.”

Even an artist of Dettmer’s renown isn’t immune from the occasional barb that he’s physically “hurting” books. His response is entirely reasonable: He only sculpts mass-produced books or ones whose content is so outdated, they’re no longer of any use; he frequently checks online to ensure he hasn’t stumbled upon a rare or valuable volume.

“I want to transform it so much that people think, ‘Wow, that’s interesting,” Dettmer said, resting his hand atop “Log 2,” a hollowed out “stump” he sculpted from an old dictionary, some of whose contents remain intact and almost impossible to tear one’s eyes away from. “And then to think, ‘It’s books.’”

Still thought-provoking, just in a different way now.

Said Dettmer: “Librarians are among my biggest defenders.”