By David Fleet
Editor
Goodrich-Kathy Mulholland needed an event to get people into her book store.
Mulholland, a Goodrich resident opened Cottage Used Books, 8331 M-15 three years ago. The store is of besieged with used books that span all genres— the mysteries and thrillers she favors, as well as contemporary fiction, classics, romance, sci-fi, historical, westerns, biographies, and more non-fiction.
“We get hundreds of books in the store,” said Mulholland. “But, some of the books we just can’t sell—such as encyclopedias. So I tried to find a craft for people to do with our old books.”
So, Kathy along with daughter Jenna Mulholland found a YouTube video on book art folding.
“I really could not figure the process out so Jenna took the folding project over and ran with it,” she said. “We created a pattern for people to follow and it really took off.”
Kathy and Jenna created a computer program to make the pattern. The program uses the number of pages and the size of the book. The data is entered into a program she designed using Excel. A pattern created designates the number of inches down from the top or bottom of the page to make a fold. Several hundred folds later, the one time unwanted book is art.

“You fold down and up,” she said. “The image in a gif or jpg format is entered in the program. Very simple images are used.”
Mulholland, earned a degree in computer programming in 1992 graduate from the University of Michigan Flint.
“There are thousands of patterns online,” she said. “But we wanted to create our own, more personalized art for the book. “The Readers Digest is the best book to use for the projects.”
Not everyone has been happy with repurposing a book, she added.
“Some say they would love to do those projects but, they could never do that to a book,” she said. “But we can’t give dictionaries or encyclopedias away—they often end up in the trash. It’s another way to recycle a book.”