Book Riot was on Instagram relatively early as media companies go. Our first post was of Chris Ware’s amazing Building Stories, a deconstructed graphic novel, all splayed out on a table—with requisite 2013 filter usage.
In our more than a decade on Instagram, we have posted thousands of things, growing to a following of more than 300,000 as of today. In that time, certain themes have emerged among our most popular posts. In looking back over them recently, I noticed that the posts that really took off, in the form of likes and shares and story-adds, were a pretty accurate snapshot of the foundations of the bookish internet itself.
So I have rounded up a whole bunch of our instagram posts that weren’t just popular, but indicative of some core part of how bookishness expresses itself online.
Books
Pictures of books are important, but they come in so many flavors. Here are a few subcategories
Sub-Category #1: Stuff Made of Books
The first time that the power of “just sort of a cool image of something made out of book” revealed to itself to us was on Facebook, but Instagram’s photo-forwardness combined with the vast improvement in mobile phone cameras brought the book-as-material fascination to the fore. This sculpture at the Kansas City public library is pretty simple with just a ring skewering enough books to fill it. But the effect is striking at does more than enough to trigger a “hey that is a cool thing to do with books” response. (This led to an annual deluge in my own Instagram feed of holiday book trees. And I look forward to them every winter.)
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