This book is a fun and unique addition to a bibliophile's library. I personally already had a couple of posters from the Postertext folks and they're great conversation pieces when people see them on my walls. I must admit that I will sometimes skim the text of the wall posters but haven't taken the time to stand and read the entire work on the poster. The same holds true for the mini-posters inside this book. It truly isn't intended to be a compact way for someone to read "cover to cover" 50 novels in the size of a single oversized book. Rather, it is intended as a sort of coffee table book and conversation starter. With the book sitting out, friends and family will laugh and then crack the book open and scan for a book that strikes their fancy before reading a few lines.

Honestly, it's not a big deal that this book will likely never have all of its pages fully read. That's not the intent. Instead, this book is a great way to drive conversations about literature and perhaps convince someone to pick up the "normal sized" version of a novel and dive into the wonderful world of words. ( )

When I first heard (or, more accurately, read) the news that PosterText was publishing a book my brain did a double take. I had to read the line over again to make sure I had parsed the statement correctly. The company that turned books into posters was now creating a book? I puzzled over what sort of book such a company might possibly produce: perhaps a large photobook comprised of images of “classic” posters?

(Although with regards to posters, the term “classic” does not imply the same qualities as it does with regards to literature. Posters do not receive critical acclaim or Nobel prizes and are never so important as to be purchased in bulk by public school for mandatory study, so I do not think that a “classic” poster needs to necessarily be a “good” poster, but rather just a famous one. “Classic” posters would be the ones that we have all seen before: the cat dangling from a tree limb over the text “Hang In There!”, the movie poster for JAWS, the “Rosie the Riveter” WWII propaganda poster, that one picture of Bob Marley that seemed to be in almost every male college dorm room, etc. etc. (or so I decided as I mulled over this tangent to the larger conundrum of what a PosterText book might be like.))

In the end, the book turned out to be a compilation of Posters created by PosterText. Thus books whose text was made into a poster were now being made back into a book.

The title, “Boundless Books” is a strange sort of a pun, which personally I find a tad awkward. So, for (1), the term “boundless” is often used (as a non-literal exaggeration) to mean “very, very many”. And indeed, “Boundless Books” contains the text of very, very many books. For (2), “boundless” is used as an uncommon equivalent to the term “unbound”. When Postertext turns the text of a book into a poster, the book is not bound. A loose-leaf stack of such posters would thus be a collection of unbound books, or, “boundless books”. But once that collection of posters is folded and stitched together with a spine and hard front and back covers, well, that’s no longer quite “boundless” now is it? It would be far more accurate to call the book “Boundless Books Bound”, but I realize that this quibble of mine is just nitpicking and is not in any way a real criticism.

Really, the only important comment I have is as follows:

Just be glad (very, very glad) that a magnifying glass is included, attached securely by a ribbon so it cannot be separated from the book, because it really is an integral component if you actually want to try to READ the thing. (The text on the original posters is quite miniscule to begin with, and the images in the book are perhaps a quarter of that size.)

4 stars for being an interesting novelty that transforms "entirely impractical" into "whimsical". ( )

This is a very odd sort of art project. It features the complete text of fifty classic works of literature -- although maybe we could debate the word "classic," as they range from books I was assigned in high school to pieces I've never heard of by authors who sound only vaguely familiar to me. The gimmick is that they're all presented in teeny-tiny text, with whitespace artistically arranged in various places between the words to form illustrations relevant to the story. I found some of the resulting pictures utterly delightful and beautifully apt, and others perhaps a little too abstract for my tastes, but you sort of have to admire the amount of work that clearly went into all of them. These are works of widely varying lengths all of which use text of the same size and begin and end at the exact corners of the page, and getting all the illustrations just so to produce that effect must have been quite a challenge.

Is there a point to it all? Maybe not. You're certainly not going to want to read the text in this book. Even with the provided magnifying glass, with which you can verify that, yep, the writing is all there, it's too much of a strain on the eyes to take in very much of it. (Or, at least, it is for my aging eyes.) But as pointless exercises go, it's an oddly charming one, the sort of thing that makes me shake my head a little and smile at the wonderful, ridiculous inventiveness of the human race.

I'll be honest, it's not a book I would ever have gone out and bought for myself, if I hadn't gotten it for free through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers' program. But it pleases me, nonetheless, to have a copy to keep in my house. Which makes me think this might make a fun gift for bookish types who also have a love for art, or an appreciation for the offbeat.

Rating: I have to give this one a 4/5 just for the sheer beautiful weirdness of the whole concept. ( )

This is a really fun book. I suppose you could read it from cover to cover but, honestly, it's a coffee table book that is better browsed. The "illustrations", if you can call them that, are just gorgeous, my favorite being Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I'm skeptical that they could fit the entire novel in each illustration but I'll. Have to trust them at that. The included magnifying glass is useless, but that's okay. If I really want to read these novels, there are formats easier on the eyes. This book, however, shows that a picture is worth many thousands of words. ( )

Boundless Books is the ultimate coffee-table classic novel collection! Fifty stories, printed to fit within a thematic design from the plot, are beautifully bound & reproduced in this oversized objet d'art. A magnifier is attached to the book with a ribbon and rests in a section of the cover boards. Sadly, the type is too small and the magnifier too weak for my tired eyes to read, but fresh young ones may find it fun and easy. I paged through, trying to guess the text from looking at the graphic art encompassing it and was somewhat successful.

All in all, a beautiful gift book for those who like their classics with a side of beautifully gimmicky art. From the art/text folks over at postertext.com. Thank you, LibraryThing, for giving me this experience. ( )