This came from here. I think by Jennifer Borges Foster, who makes the beautiful journal Filter, here. Her blog here. She explains,

"I love old books—novels, naturalist's books, sex books, books about animal husbandry and etiquette—I could go on and on. I love these books because they are printed elegantly, they are out of copyright, so I can reinvent them without facing charges, and because they are often astoundingly reprehensible or amazingly progressive (we may have amassed a lot of technology in the last 150 years, but human thinking hasn't changed that much). I've erased things many different ways—the most straightforward being white-out, the most complicated being reprinting pages from a 100-year-old book on rice paper and suspending the rice paper pages in beeswax, and then carefully etching out the words that I wanted visible"

in an interview here. More, please.