Many thanks to Sebastiaan for alerting me to the work of Brian Dettmer, an American artist who uses knives, tweezers, and other surgical instruments to transform old encyclopaedias and dictionaries into visually and technically impressive pieces of sculpture. More images of his work can be seen here or here.

Nothing is added to these books; rather, with the aid of his sharp tools Dettmer investigates their contents in corporeal terms, exposing, in the example above, the grotesque innards of volumes we usually think of as neat, orderly, and contained. The physicality of the book is full of interpretative potential for Dettmer, and his sculptures interrogate the three-dimensional space of the book as material object to be physically as well as intellectually probed and dissected.