There are also blooks within blooks, like "The Book of Books," a shelf of miniature wooden blocks painted to resemble individual books of the Bible — a memorization aid for children, according to an early 20th-century advertisement Ms. Dubansky unearthed.
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Still, some blooks offer more than just their unique physical presence and do hold sentimental value for their owners.
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Blooks: The Art of Books That Aren't continues at the Grolier Club (47 East 60th Street, Manhattan) through March 12.
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The exhibition, "Blooks: The Art of Books That Aren't," appears to be the first of its kind in the United States.
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The objects in categories — religion, commemoration, photography, food, toys, grooming and so on — forming what Ms. Dubansky calls a tentative taxonomy of blooks.
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"I see blooks as a parallel to book history, but I've had trouble getting people to take them seriously because of the association with kitsch," she said.
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On the flip side, other blooks, from ceramic ashtrays to lighters with decorated dust jackets, focused only on the superficial look of a book and do not open at all.
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The variety of blooks — both handmade and commercially manufactured, and constructed of all types of material — is remarkable and overwhelming, with some items dating as far back as the late 18th century.
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Many of these objects are admittedly slightly kitschy, but the unexpected shedding of pages — what makes books symbols of knowledge — to simply having the image of a book around you is what makes blooks particularly endearing.
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Such objects are referred to as "book-looks" — or "blooks," a term coined by Mindell Dubansky, a preservation librarian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Thomas J. Watson Library who has over the years amassed hundreds of examples.
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A sample of her growing collection is now on view at the Grolier Club in the exhibition Blooks: The Art of Books that Aren't, filling the shelves of its second floor gallery with over 100 objects that resemble books, illustrating our fascination with their design and architecture rather than simply the contents of their pages.
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Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine won the contest and subsequently invented the term. Pierce went on to publish two other blooks, How To Blog and Stiff. Print-on-demand publisher Lulu inaugurated the Lulu Blooker Prize for blooks, which was first awarded in 2006. The printed blook phenomenon is not limited to self-publishing.
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The Lulu Blooker Prize was a literary award for "blooks" (books based on blogs). It was awarded in 2006 and 2007 and sponsored by Lulu.com. An overall prize was awarded, based on the winners of three subsidiary categories: non-fiction, fiction, and comics. The Lulu Blooker Prize was open to any "blook" that had been published "to date" (i.e.
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Pessoa regularly organizes events in Brazil and abroad to encourage reading or to promote Portuguese-language literature, including sessions at the Salon du livre de Paris, Abu Dhabi International Book Fair or Boston Book Festival, in partnership with academic institutions such as Paris- Sorbonne University, Abu Dhabi Department of Culture & Tourism, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) or Boston University. Events in Brazil have been organized with Sesc, the Culture Secretariat of the State Government of São Paulo, and Blooks Bookstore, among other institutions.
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