What to do when you have so many books, so little room? If your books are beyond reading but you can’t bear to send them to the recycler just yet, here are some eco-friendly ideas:

Brunswick Bound, a bookstore in Brunswick, Victoria, Australia, incorporated hundreds of books into its checkout counter. According to Susie Arambasic, one of the owners of the shop, the otherwise unwanted hardcovers were sourced from the back of opportunity shops and old library stock. The books are stacked together, with just a bit of silicone used in strategic places, around two sides of a full-sized custom-designed desk.

Brunswick Bound's checkout counter made from rescued books.

The Ex Libris Bookstore on the campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia surrounded the structural pillars of its reclaimed industrial space with dozens of sets of outdated Law Reporters.

All the Ex Libris Bookstore's pillars are made from recycled, outdated Law Reporters, like this.

And the Dutch conceptual artist Job Koelewijn won a Heineken Prize for Art in 2006 for an exhibit, Continuing Performance consisting of four sections. One section, an untitled giant figure-eight bookcase, was filled with several hundred hardbacks symbolizing the infinite nature of knowledge and the power of books. In 2007 he produced, Sanctuary, a life-size gas station made entirely from bookcovers raising the question whether books and gas stations would be extinct in the future.

One section of Job Koelewijn's exhibit, Continuing Performance

Job Koelewijn's life-size gas station made from the covers of books.

Other eco-friendly reuses for old books range from the turning them into picture frames and transforming damaged books into word books that help children learn to read and transforming them into altered books, an emerging art form.  What uses have you found for old books? (Pictures always welcome)