How do you select the book to begin with? I'm new to this, and I've been experimenting with scraps and torn-out pages, but I haven't been able to select a book to really begin work on. How do things like size, thickness, age, etc play into the decision? Is the topic of the book important at all? Should the base book be interesting in its own right, or should it just be a canvas to build on?

I bought a crate of old books at a junk store, and I just can't decide. I have old books on learning to speak French, and I even have a dictionary from the early 1900s with the original owner's name written in, and a few library stamps, and even a little bug squished between the pages sometime in the last 100 years. Is it a good candidate? or should I choose something more sedate?