Don’t judge a purse by its cover. No, that’s not a typo; we are talking about purses here…and book covers. It should be no surprise that the most well-read city in the nation is home to a designer who managed to turn books into handbags. Mary Lydia Ryan a Seattleite for the past 19 years has inventively created a brand new type of purse as well as a new form of functional art.
Mary was working a corporate job, one she was looking for a way out of, when a friend of hers bought a used bookstore. He asked if she thought she could do anything with the old books that had become too damaged, yellowed, and aged to keep. He jokingly suggested that she could make purses out of the books and the creative idea behind Mary Lydia Ryan purses was born. She began to take the books home, creating an inventory base that now overflows from underneath her bed into a full storage locker downtown. In late 2006, after creating the first models and finding that they needed some work, Mary partnered with fellow local artist Gary Parker to improve the designs. They added Kristen Bonnalie to the team as their seamstress and the trio began to produce a collection of purses, clutches, and billfolds. In the summer of 2007, the collection was officially launched and can now be purchased in several boutiques in the Seattle area. The interest in the bags stretches to Idaho and there have been talks of a carrier in Japan.It may come as a surprise that the purses were not necessarily designed to fulfill an interest in fashion. If you ask Mary about her original motives in starting the project she will admit that it was purely accidental and that it stemmed from her need to do something creative after simply punching the time-clock for too long. When I met with Mary at Café Luce in the U-District to discuss her work, I asked her how she would compare her purses to the logo-laden bank account-draining designer bags that have waiting lists years long. She responded, “Well, I’m not a designer. I create them for their artistic value. There’s a lot of work that goes into them, but I didn’t create the covers. It’s more of a recycling project and I think that people appreciate them for being usable pieces of art."
Mary was working a corporate job, one she was looking for a way out of, when a friend of hers bought a used bookstore. He asked if she thought she could do anything with the old books that had become too damaged, yellowed, and aged to keep. He jokingly suggested that she could make purses out of the books and the creative idea behind Mary Lydia Ryan purses was born. She began to take the books home, creating an inventory base that now overflows from underneath her bed into a full storage locker downtown. In late 2006, after creating the first models and finding that they needed some work, Mary partnered with fellow local artist Gary Parker to improve the designs. They added Kristen Bonnalie to the team as their seamstress and the trio began to produce a collection of purses, clutches, and billfolds. In the summer of 2007, the collection was officially launched and can now be purchased in several boutiques in the Seattle area. The interest in the bags stretches to Idaho and there have been talks of a carrier in Japan.It may come as a surprise that the purses were not necessarily designed to fulfill an interest in fashion. If you ask Mary about her original motives in starting the project she will admit that it was purely accidental and that it stemmed from her need to do something creative after simply punching the time-clock for too long. When I met with Mary at Café Luce in the U-District to discuss her work, I asked her how she would compare her purses to the logo-laden bank account-draining designer bags that have waiting lists years long. She responded, “Well, I’m not a designer. I create them for their artistic value. There’s a lot of work that goes into them, but I didn’t create the covers. It’s more of a recycling project and I think that people appreciate them for being usable pieces of art."
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