I grabbed the thickest book I could find at goodwill, Pathophysiology, Fourth Edition by McCance and Huether. It cost me a buck fifty.
The results were… less than stunning. I would love to know what Mr. Laramée did to keep the pages tight during the material-removal process. I used spring clamps. Shards of paper kept clogging my gun, and I’m gonna need to filter 20lbs of blast media to be able to re-use it.
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Do you think he soaked the pages in a glue solution, let it dry and then shot it?
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maybe… I got a couple other goodwill books to destroy, I might try that idea.
I was thinking of painting glue onto the edges, the way you would if you were hollowing out a book to make a hidey-spot.
If I had my GF I would probably make a fitted perimeter clamp (ok, I guess could do that with a jigsaw)
why not just do it with a book that is soaked through do it while it’s wet and all the water is sticking things together then use somethign to dehydrate it?
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I think… mind you I’m no expert at all here… but I think that putting a wet book in the cabinet would cause me grief. Moisture and powdered blast media don’t seem to get along too well. I like the idea though. Maybe soaking it with water and letting it dry with a weight on top would get the pages to stick together enough. I like @jamesdhatch’s suggestion of soaking it in a glue solution, wonder if that would make the pages too hard. With the air-pressure I have available (maybe half of what it should be), the blast gun that I have (unmodified cheapo harbor freight with lots of air leaks) it took me a while to get through the cover of the book, but tore through the pages pretty easily.
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Part of me is HORRIFIED that a book could be destroyed in this manner… another part of me loves the beauty of these sculptures…
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Plus you run the risk of it molding…even a tiny bit of water is dangerous and once a book molds, it spreads to those nearby. (Can you tell I’ve had many a chat with a student about this?) 
This has been a PSA from your resident librarian and protector of books…although I’d tear into one in a second if I could create something like this! 
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Not sure if this is safe to cut, but…
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I was too. I was encouraged by some folks in this thread to be less horrified. The books at the goodwill here apparently go from the front shelf, to the mid shelf, to the back shelf, and then to the shredder.
I got my TBHM books from the back shelf (that’s To Be Horribly Mutilated).
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This has been in my mind the entire time:
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That is amazing!