Can't quite put my finger on it....an altered book about fingerprints

I've spent the last couple of weeks obsessed with a strange old book. It started life as a guide to fingerprinting, published in 1936. I bound a selection of pages into an accordion book using black card stock.

Here are the first and last pages.

I added ephemera from my huge stash of vintage magazines and books. Who knew that Emily Bronte was an amateur fingerprint analyst?

At first, I added lots of people, like the men in this spread. (They came from old kids books that I turn into Kindle cases in my Etsy shop.)

But the more I worked with the pages, the less I wanted to see people. Instead, I pulled diagrams and technical drawings from an old set of "Family Handyman" books. 

And hands...I added all the hands I could find...hammering hands, cutting hands, scrubbing hands, painting hands, even bow-tieing hands.

These hands are polishing the fingerprints to a lustrous shine.

These tiny pink imps are actually electrons. What, exactly, could they be up to????

This is only half the book. Stay tuned for part 2....