Book Castle

As a kid and a teenager, I always loved reading books. Another thing I always enjoyed was building: whether it's LEGOs, jigsaw puzzles or anything else - I always loved putting things together. So, every now and then, I would bring those two hobbies together and build something from books. The older I grew, the more books I bought and read, and the bigger my building projects became. So now I want to share with you some tips and guidelines on how to build your very own book-castle!

1. Books - as many as you can muster! Hardcovers, paperbacks, magazines, booklets, encyclopedias, dictionaries, phone books, photo albums... everything goes, and the more the merrier!

2. Rubber bands are not an absolute must, but they can come in very handy.

Every good castle has a grandiose flight of stairs at its front gate. You can easily make such stairs with books. A good idea would be to use books which are at about the same level of thickness - and it would look better if they'd be relatively thin - say, 100-200 page paperbacks.

Now it's time to start flooring the first level of your castle. The challenge here is keeping all the floor tiles at the same height. A good tip would be using thinner components, such as magazines or comic-books, to compensate for small differences in height.

Walls are trickier. Here is where hardcovers work best, given their toughness compared to paperbacks. Keeping them all at the same height is important! Also, you should add an extra book down the middle in order to better support the upcoming ceiling.

The ceiling of your first level serves as the floor for your next level. That is, unless you want to add more than one layer, but it isn't necessary. Use several books of the same thickness, and spread them to form the ceiling. Again, magazines and comic-books can be great for compensating small differences in height between the books you used for your walls. After the flooring is done, you can build your second level's walls - just the same as you did for the first level!

Now for the roof. Just make a ceiling like before, and add some decorations: you can use a large book, such as an encyclopedia, an atlas or an old photo album for a turret, and a rolled-up magazine bound with a rubber band for a chimney. Similar rolled-up magazines can be used as pillars, to level-out the magazines you may have used on your ceilings, by the way.

Go wild! If you have extra books to spare, you can build some walls and battlements, guard towers, a gatehouse, or anything else you might want to add! Put in some additional decorations as you see fit. Enjoy your magnificent castle!