Buy this set of books at Etsy for $1.00

I had some boots that I really loved so much, they were my favorites, but they wore out almost completely, and the plastic soles came off, and one got lost, and all seemed hopeless. I even took them to a shoe repair service and they would not fix them. But I could not bear to throw them away and I saved them for much longer than was even sensible.

Then I discovered the idea of taking shoes apart and using the pieces to make book covers, so here they are! These are 100% inspired by the amazing shoe books that Linda Roberts shared on instagram.

Step one – take them apart into the various different sections … this step took much longer than I expected it would and was also more interesting than I expected it would be.

Then I sewed the pieces together with various kinds of paper in them. I left them pretty rough on purpose, because I was imagining them being put together under difficult circumstances after the zombie plague or some similar post-apoc fantasy situation. My thinking is that if you are at the point of making book covers out of old boots, something has gone horribly awry in society, right?

Most of them have plain paper, either old white paper or old sketch paper. For one of them, the pages are cut from the junk mail envelopes that showed up over the past several days.

A few have other papers, graph paper, yellow legal pad, and an old brown envelope that I cut up.

I made these boot books in 2025, but I’m associating the project with #areyoubookenough_journey from Dec 2017, because I’m trying to catch up and do all the ones I missed. I picked Journey because these were my larp boots and I have indeed walked many a mile in these boots.

Fun project, I’m glad I did it!