What do you do with books? Read them, right? Not James Trevino. This 24-year-old also arranges them into elaborate colourful displays, snaps their pictures and posts them on his favourite social platform. He calls himself ‘bookstagrammer’ and his Instagram account boasts of over 130,000 followers.
Trevino is popular because he is creative and has a knack of arranging his book collection into aesthetic displays. He is very particular about the colour of books’ jackets. In some of his creations, he places the books according to a colour scheme that makes it appear like strokes of a paintbrush. He then gets the picture shot from the best angle with him as the centrepiece!
So, what was the inspiration behind his unusual creativity? Says Trevino, “It just sort of happened. At first, I was posting pictures of my then current reads. With time, the photos got more and more complex, influence mostly by pop culture and sometimes by certain pictures I saw on Instagram.”
Trevino doesn’t arbitrarily arrange his books to create his scenes but goes through a process. He explains, “First, there is the brainstorming I do with my good friend Elizabeth. Then, once we have a general idea, I and Liz try to bring it as close as possible to our vision. If the concept proves to be too large to capture in a single frame, we combine two or more photos in post editing.” Although there are diverse book arrangements on his page, two books are always prominent – JK Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’ and JRR Tolkien’s ‘The Silmarillion’.
Trevino currently owns a total of 1,100 books and plans to include more titles to his sizeable book collection. His motivation is the overwhelming response he receives from his fans.
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