Because I'm supposed to be decluttering (trendy term for chucking stuff out), I have mixed emotions toward the friend who gave me the tip about RubyDog's Art House (4738 Main Street, closed Mondays). One look at the Web site (www.dxmarket.com/collagejoy/) and I'm on my way. Two minutes in the door, I recognize that this is a very dangerous place. Minimalists won't get the appeal of boxes and boxes of buttons, retro-china taps marked “hot”  and “cold” , old triangular cheese labels from England, keys, dominoes, Mountie playing cards, pinup playing cards, postage stamps, cardboard milk-bottle tops, reproductions of Victorian “scraps” , assorted watch faces, a deposit slip from 1863, and wine labels from the 1920s and '30s. Even the most ardent collector, thrifter, or yard-sale haunter will be gobsmacked by the plethora of huge aviation maps, old atlases you can buy by the page, player-piano paper, aged stock certificates, blank perforated sheets to make your own faux postage stamps, British beer mats, and Manila shipping tags. But anyone with the tiniest splinter of an artistic bone in her body will feel the kind of rush you normally only get from a triple espresso. This, my friends, is the inspirational mother lode, the ultimate stash of materials crying out to be transformed into art for your home: collages, decorated furniture and furnishings, and altered books, the last being an art form I didn't even know existed until I stopped in here and am now completely obsessed with.

Showing me a kid's board book, its original story now completely masked by coins, maps, a butterfly, and handwritten text, owner Leanne Bishop says it was her own passion for altered books, mostly eBay finds, that got the store going. Reconfiguring such objects isn't a new form of self-expression. British artist Tom Phillips started work on his altered Victorian novel, A Humument (Thames and Hudson, $42) in 1966 and makes more changes, says Bishop, with each new edition. (The fourth edition appeared in 2005.) Local artist Nick Bantock also helped kick off the trend of making art from found objects, she adds. His Urgent 2nd Class: Creating Curious Collage, Dubious Documents, and Other Art from Ephemera (Raincoast Books, 2004) is one of several Bibles for practitioners. Recent fads for rubber-stamping and scrapbooking have also fed what began as isolated streams of creativity and are now, to judge from Internet content, a flood.

Bishop herself can't remember when collages began to enthrall her or when she decided to put collage-making packages together to sell on the Web, her secret life while she worked full-time as a stockbroker. Two years ago, she followed her bliss, took over 1,550 square feet (and a 900-square-foot basement) on a less- frequented stretch of Main Street, named it after her now-eight-year-old dog (“part yellow Lab, part beagle, and other random contributors to the gene pool” ), and filled it with the ephemera she'd been collecting for years.

“These are from 1922,”  she says as she pulls down a stack of huge ledger pages from Philadelphia, faded brown ink on yellowed paper. Beside them is a box of First Day Covers””stamps attached to envelopes the first day they were issued””also from the U.S., some going back to the 1940s. She riffles through 1895 court documents, old bingo cards, nothing more than a couple of bucks and most costing much less.

Parked outside, Bishop's car is piled high with leftovers from a local printing firm. Companies give her unwanted odds and sods to fill the bins and boxes in the bulk section. She also negotiates with stores for quantity buys on, for instance, maps of London. A cabinet contains thousands of sheets of press-on lettering in dozens of typefaces from pre-iBook days. Two elderly postal boxes, finds from the Sally Ann, organize can and bottle labels from the 1920s on in a total of 60 compartments. Drawers hold handmade papers. “You love paper? Look at this,”  says Bishop and hauls out old watermarked typewriter sheets. Local artists contribute creations such as “collage sheets”  printed with miniatures from their own vintage postcard collections.

There's lab equipment: tiny test tubes that some customers use for wall hangings to display single flowers. “Nothing is sold for its original intention,”  says Bishop, explaining that microscope slides are often incorporated into altered books. Technique is never the stumbling block; learning to look past an object's literal use can, however, take time. “The first time you alter a book is really hard,”  she admits. Even a Starbucks commuter mug becomes a thing of beauty when deconstructed and collaged with retro images. A shelving unit is covered with pages in different languages; a suitcase is collaged with maps and photocopies of postcards. If the examples of display aren't enough to spur your imagination, you can go on-line for inspiration, sit down in the store's reference library, or sign up for classes. (Details are on Bishop's Web site.) “With altered art, there's no huge learning curve,”  she says. “You can jump in and make something right away.” 