“My name is Jane Mount, and I started Ideal Bookshelf in 2008. I believe books make us better, allowing us to visit other people's lives and understand them. And books connect us, to characters, to authors, and, most importantly, to each other.
“I started painting my books, and then my friends’ books just as they lay on their shelves, but I soon realized it was much more interesting to ask them what books they loved, which books made them who they are today.
“That’s when I started Ideal Bookshelf, and began doing custom pieces for people, painting portraits of them from the inside instead of the outside. I find it endlessly fascinating to see what books people pick, and while painting or making a print I think all about what that person might be like, based on their choices.”
BOOKS INCLUDED:
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez
- The Street by Ann Petry
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
- East of Eden by John Steinbeck
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
- Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
- Catch -22 by Joseph Heller
- Slaughterhouse - Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- Lolita by Nabokov
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
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