About

Bookface is a participatory photo game in which people place a book cover in front of their face to reveal a "hybrid face" of the subject and the image on the cover of the book. Bookface bears many similarities to other face-obscuring photo fads, including sleeveface and moneyface.

Origin

The earliest known iteration of the use of the term bookface in relation to the act of placing in front of one's head happened on March 14th, 2012. That day, Twitter user @nikeshshukla^[1] posted a picture of himself bookfacing (shown below) with the caption: "Remember #sleeveface last year? Anyone wanna play #bookface with me?"

Precursor

Sleeveface (also known as "LP Portraits") is a participatory photo meme that involves placing a record sleeve in front of one’s face and taking a profile picture, which reveals a “hybrid face” of the subject and famous person depicted on the vinyl cover. See also: Money Face.

The term "Sleeveface" was coined in April 2007 by Welsh DJ Carl Morris after pictures were taken of him and his friends holding record sleeves to their faces while Djing at a bar in Cardiff, UK. His friend John Rostron subsequently posted the images online and created a group on Facebook, where it turned into a popular craze.

The official Sleeveface blog^[5] was launched by Morris and Rostron on January 21st, 2008 and the instructional YouTube video on "How to make a sleeveface" was uploaded on February 3rd, 2008.

Spread

On October 4th, the Twitter account for Waterstones Cribbs bookstore tweeted a picture (shown below, left) of an employee bookfacing with Arnold Schwarzanegger's autobiography. Schwarzenegger^[3] retweeted the picture (shown below, right), writing, "This is absolutely fantastic. '@WaterstonesCC: We love the new @Schwarzenegger biog so much we've started #bookface.'"

That month, @WaterstonesCC tweeted more Bookface images, which seemed to the beginning of the trend theor bookstores and libraries performing bookface as a promotional tool.

On May 1st, 2015, The New York Public Library^[4] started the hashtag #bookface on Instagram in celebration of Free Comic Book Day. One photo shared by @NYPL from the Cherry Hill Public Library, shown below, received more than 2,500 likes.

Library Mollat

On April 26th, 2017, the website Mashable^[7] wrote an article that highlighted the ongoing bookface campaign by the French book store "Library Mollat," the first independent bookstore in France, which opened in 1896. The bookstore's instagram^[8] currently has over 21,000 followers.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References