I did a little Googling to find out a little more about this piece…from queries such as ‘book boat,’ encyclopedias carved into boats,’ ‘artists making encyclopedias into boats,’ ‘Justin Beiber,’ but nothing came up.  Growing up our house was always full of contemporary art paintings, but the “Book Boat,” as our family labeled it, has always been one of my favorites. Maybe because it’s so simple.  I would ask myself so many times why I hadn’t come up with the idea to take an old set of Britannicas, carve out the open area into what looks like a boat and shove it between a cement cut-out, fitted with wedges.  I mean, how hard is that?!

It’s hard.

My brother and I would certainly do our share of running around the house, playing football, wrestling for the remote, ignoring the threats of “no TV” from mom, and once or twice the Book Boat played the role of a sideline reporter that was occasionally knocked to the ground after a failed “student-body right” and left in shambles.

The "Book Boat" now resides in our office lobby

It looks like a sturdy little piece and even if it did fall, the set is labeled alphabetically. “Boat’ is the standard picture that accompanies the letter “B” when learning the alphabet, so putting it back together should be a breeze, right? My brother and I would panic and scramble to get it back in one piece before the sound of the folks’ car pulled into the garage—sometimes successfully, most of the time not.

Sure the consequences ranged from a stern warning to a rare grounding (for Gen Y’ers – grounding: to restrict the activities, esp. social activities), but I’ve never taken it against the Book Boat and sometimes I even hear it ask me to run one more play in it’s direction.