Dust Jacket Panorama Art

Inspired by Dust Jacket Art, I decided to take it up a notch and use the same concept with a panorama and hide a random collection of paperback books behind a scenic picture.

See below for how I did it.

First up, I found a nice panoramic shot that would look good on the bookcase.  I ultimately settled on a 2560 x 1024 shot of the Golden Gate Bride up on Best Image Upload.

The next step was to slice it into pieces needed for printing.  This was achieved with the magic of ImageMagick.  The script is below

#!/bin/sh
_file=bridge.png
_index=0;

while [ ${_index} -lt 20 ] ; do
    _x_offset=`expr ${_index} \* 128`
    convert -crop 400x1024+${_x_offset} ${_file} crop_${_index}_${_file}
    _index=`expr ${_index} + 1`
done

This yielded lots of small slices from the image similar to what is below.

I then used the following print command to print these.

lpr -o landscape -o scaling=100 -o media=Letter -o position=center crop_0_bridge.png

Thankfully the cups print clients are sufficiently smart with these options to allow me to print the strips of the images directly in the middle of the page. This gave me a collection of pages to work with.

From there it was a matter of selecting a book, selecting the next strip that fit.

Folding the pages to suit the spine of the book. This was actually very easy to do.

Mind you, now that I’ve put the pages around the books like that, I need to keep the books in the same order. I also need to work out a way to know which books are behind which section. I’ll probably write the book name under the picture in small print :). It’s best to cover books that you probably won’t read for a while.