In an age when libraries are closing, ebooks sales are soaring and the death of the paperback is predicted every five minutes, one man has decided to pay a beautiful stop-motion tribute to the joy of ‘real’ books.
Sean Ohlenkamp, a creative director at a Toronto marketing agency, spent four night filming The Joy Of Books at his local independent bookstore Type Books, using more than 15 volunteers and hundreds of paper and hardback titles.
Starting once the shop closed for the day, Ohlenkamp and his team had to photograph each shot in the intricate sequence independently – but even more tiring than that, they also had to restore the books to their original locations.
"At around 5 a.m. we had to start putting books back for their next business day," he told Huffington Post Canada. "I never want to see another book as long as I live.”
According to Type Books owners, The Joy Of Books gives out the message that ‘books are not dead’. Certainly in the video they seem very much alive, capturing the sense of romance and potential a room of books conjures for people.
The video, like a book version of Toy Story or Beauty & The Beast, also invokes that delicious idea of inanimate objects we love coming to life in our absence.
As Ohlenkamp puts it himself: "There's something magical about stores like this and I wanted to get that out her."
While the video continues to rack up views on YouTube, over in the Twittersphere people are unanimous: