“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:
Light in August - Faulkner
On the Road - Kerouac
The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald
The Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Garcia Marquez
The Old Man and the Sea - Hemingway
Lolita - Nabokov
East of Eden - Steinbeck
Brave New World - Huxley
Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf
Beloved - Morrison
Slaughterhouse-Five - Vonnegut
Catch-22 - Heller
Invisible Man - Ellison
The Bell Jar - Plath
The Handmaid's Tale - Atwood
A Confederacy of Dunces - Toole To Kill a Mockingbird - Lee
Lord of the Flies - Golding
Nineteen Eighty-Four - Orwell
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Hurston
