I’ve spent an unsavoury chunk of this year unable to loiter in the bookshops and charity shops of York, my eyes and fingers starved of the vital printed inspiration that feeds my own work. Frustrated, I’ve redirected this attention towards my own bookshelves, revisiting a personal library too often taken for granted. Unfortunately, reading and looking isn’t enough for all that pent-up, poring-over energy. No, I’ve taken to cutting things up.

Restlessly keen to pounce on any passing creative bandwagon, I’ve found myself working the recent resurgence of collage into my book design. I’ve been cutting and pasting for real for a change, and it’s incredibly satisfying – if a little destructive.

I’m enjoying getting back in touch with material. I design physical products, but my part in the process usually takes place entirely under glass. Sometimes I don’t get to actually feel my work until months later. And it’s an odd thing to complain about, but working on screen, one is spoilt by too much power – everything can be changed, everything can be undone, there are no limits. I feel like a drone pilot attacking an image from afar with impunity, rather than getting up close and working with it.

With collage, the joy comes with sourcing and selecting the material, tackling the constraints and the qualities of the material

With collage, the joy comes with sourcing and selecting the material, tackling the constraints and the qualities of the material, being steered in an unexpected direction by the size or quality or texture of the images you’ve found, finding new contexts and juxtapositions for images divorced of meaning. You have to make decisions, and you have to commit to them. It all feels so much more definite.

Delving deeper and messier into this medium, I’ve discovered practical considerations I’d always taken for granted. A shameless banal inquisitor, my instincts drive me to hunt down and pester my favourite collagists to get some insight into their techniques. Where do you source materials? How do you organise them? Do you use scissors or a knife? What form of adhesive do you use? Do you work entirely by hand, or do you finish off digitally? Do you photograph or scan the finished piece? (It turns out this is a particularly big one, as the same piece of work can look different depending on how you finally capture it.)

Fortunately, this interrogation has mostly been done for me, thanks to recent collections of contemporary collage artists such as DR. ME’s Cut Me Out and Rebeka Elizegi’s Collage by Women, joining various other monographs and collections on my bookshelves. Part of the enjoyment of wandering down a new creative path is the study of it – while I litter my desk with shards of paper and my fingers with paper cuts, I’m learning about a whole new world.

Is there a limit to collaging collages of collages? No, before I make any more cuts, I must amass some new old-source material. Those shops are calling me

So why is collage having a moment? Is it a response to the proliferation of digital forms? An embrace of the opening up of public access archives, ripe for plundering? A technique that lends itself to social media’s creation-as-performance environment? The natural resting state of the 21st-century’s fragmented culture? Or is it popular with art directors right now simply because … it’s popular with art directors right now? Probably all of the above, plus a hundred other reasons.

The big question for me: how do I resist cannibalising these books? Is there a limit to collaging collages of collages? No, before I make any more cuts, I must amass some new old-source material. Those shops are calling me. I want some books that I don’t want so I can destroy them and make books with them and … I really need to get out more.

Daniel Benneworth-Gray is a freelance designer based in York. See danielgray.com and @gray