There’s a mixture of favourite classics and beautiful vintage books, along with whole bays dedicated to books shortlisted for prizes this year...They may have chocolate inside, but on the outside they have blurbs and barcodes, just like real books.
More details and how to make your own at Playing by the book
The more that the book is venerated as a physical item, something that, unlike a screen, people want to hold and even smell, the more the bookstore turns into a temple. The physical space where books are kept, and where booksellers friendly and grumpy alike can provide guidance in the world of books, becomes more important.
More by Katie Orphan at Literary Hub
A bookcase and floor lamp. The weight of the books helps the lamp to bend in a manner so accentuated to support the LED panel placed at the end.
Amitrani
Modular and flexible bookshelf composed of vertical rails and horizontal elements that can be attanged to form shelves, containers, bookholders.
Mauro del Santo
Books have always had a fetishistic quality to them, with their dusty secretiveness. Now, though, it feels like we’re living through a special moment in the history of book design and beautiful books are everywhere. Take George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo with its marmoreal endpapers or Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads, with its cover inspired by mosaic from the Imam mosque at Isfahan; Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, its sumptuous jacket inspired by the tiles of William Morris; 4th Estate’s gorgeous repackaging of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s backlist, based on vibrant African headwrap patterns; the glimmering Penguin Hardcover Classics reissue of the works of F Scott Fitzgerald, or its clothbound editions of Austen, Brontë and Dickens. It’s hard to know whether to read these books or caress them.
Read more at The Guardian
A free standing metal bookcase and room divider.
Material: 8 mm bar steel
Dimensions version 1: h 165 x w 100 x d 36 cm
Dimensions version 2: h 198 x w 45 x d 36 cm
Gerard de Hoop
Britons are abandoning the ebook at an alarming rate with sales of consumer titles down almost a fifth last year, as “screen fatigue” helped fuel a five-year high in printed book sales. Sales of consumer ebooks plunged 17% to £204m last year, the lowest level since 2011 – the year the ebook craze took off as Jeff Bezos’ market-dominating Amazon Kindle took the UK by storm. It is the second year running that sales of consumer ebooks – the biggest segment of the £538m ebook market, which fell 3% last year – have slumped as commuters, holidaymakers and leisure readers shelve digital editions in favour of good old fashioned print novels.
The Guardian (and also here)
Whether you have few, or many books in your possession, the real trick is to arrange them in a way that is visually appealing as their contents. A tour of the most beautiful and beguiling bookcases to inspire your library-in-the-making.
More at Vogue
This project started with the idea that household items such as furniture would be able to add energy to many people if they were designed to function in a new structure, beyond the static and tedious vertical and horizontal structure. At first, the position of the ball is variable according to the gradient. But when you put the book on the Oddly, the center of gravity is shifted to the right. And at this time, the ball rolls down to hold the book as a book stopper.
Materials: Brass & Black Walnut WoodYoungmin Kang
ODDLY from Youngmin Kang on Vimeo.
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All new partitioning in the building, even when carving out spaces for restrooms and a kitchenette, is created exclusively by book shelves. In one half of the building these bookshelves appear in white (offices) and the other half is filled with black bookshelves (entry hall). Coming from the central corridor one only sees black bookshelves and when coming from the offices one encounters white bookshelves. A 360-degree rotating door between the corridor and the director’s offices, black on one side and white on the other, reverses white to black.
Marcela Steinbachová (Skupina) and Steven Holl Architects
I was thinking about the Borges story The Library of Babel and I got to wondering whether anyone had done any decent renderings of it.
Full story at JWZ via Boing Boing
The historic book odour wheel is a new tool that combines the chemical and sensory aspects of the odour experience and can be considered a preliminary piece in an archival method for heritage smells. It has the potential to be used as a diagnostic tool by conservators, informing on the condition of the object through its olfactory profile. In terms of visitor experience and interpretation, the olfactory experience in museums, both as a communication strategy and as an art form, could contribute to improved learning, to a more personal connection to the exhibits and an increased overall enjoyment.Pictured above, odour wheel of historic book containing general aroma categories, sensory descriptors and chemical information on the smells as sampled (colours are arbitrary)
More at Heritage Science Journal, by Cecilia Bembibre and Matija Strlič
“Chocolate”, “cocoa’” or “chocolatey” were the most frequent words used to describe the smell of a copy of French writer Bernard Gasset’s 1928 novel Les Chardons du Baragan, followed by “coffee”, “old”, “wood” and “burnt”.
More at The Guardian
"Distinct from any podium or lectern, Dickens had this reading desk specially crafted to fit his needs on stage. First among these alterations was Dickens's request that the desk be constructed as an open box, without side walls obstructing the audience’s full view of the speaker. This innovation would have been necessary for one of Dickens’s live readings, as he relied heavily on full-body gestures and movement in order to bring his beloved characters to life."
More at Charles Dickens Museum
This inspired piece by Simon Pengelly is a response to our need for bookcases to house a plethora of items that differ vastly in shape and size. It is produced in two halves and can be used as such or joined as one whole piece. Made with solid oak. Available also in walnut.
Joined and Jointed and Simon Pengelly
An extraordinary erotic bookcase has been lent for display outside Paris for the first time, in an exhibition on French Belle Époque prints at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum. Designed by François-Rupert Carabin, it is surmounted by three female nudes modelled from prostitutes recruited at Montmartre brothels.
The Art Newspaper
Size:136cm x 149.5cm x48cm
Material: birch wood composite board
Color: walnut, ash, birc
Weight: 22kg
AliExpress
"A system of organization, whatever its parameters, should render case-by-case choices obsolete: A book either is or is not a true-crime thriller, does or does not contain fiction, was or was not written by Agatha Christie. But in practice, every organizational schema is a doomed attempt to blanket chaos with order, and only more so the grander its ambitions. It may be possible to draw a sensible line delineating science from nature, art from design, autobiography from memoir, or war history from American history from Native American history, but to do so is to suggest that any one exists independently from the other. The clear lines bleed and become wobbly."
More at LitHub
American photographer Thomas R Schiff uses a panoramic camera to capture epic pictures of libraries across the US. The Library Book, published by Aperture, features buildings across the country from the earliest institutions to modernist architecture, tracing the evolution of the library as central to American culture. It is accompanied by an exhibition at the Aperture Foundation in New York City until 20 April.
Pictured: George Peabody Library, Baltimore (top), Fredrick Ferris Thompson Memorial Library at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York (bottom)
The Guardian
Located in a converted warehouse in downtown Calgary, the client’s loft had an unused space that was once part of the building’s industrial elevator shaft. Taking advantage of the room’s high ceilings and small footprint, the space was adapted into a climbable library and music studio. The verticality of the room prompted the design of a climbable shelving system that playfully and efficiently uses minimal floor area while providing ample storage and display space. The millwork wall has handholds and foot tabs integrated into the structure to facilitate climbing and make fetching a book fun.
Studio North
Africa Educational Trust is looking to raise £3,000 to allow them to transport 10,000 books donated by Book Aid to 66 libraries, including Donkey Drawn Libraries, across Somalia.
Lots more details at Playing by the Book
Hoja is a bookcase in poplar plywood that allows you to hold about 40 books in a small space. The product dimensions are 255x225x790 mm. The object is assembled without screws or bolts, you'll only need a hammer to fix the joints.
Alessio Rocchi
Sitting With Jane is a unique public art trail to celebrate Jane Austen’s connections with Basingstoke and her birthplace, Steventon, and forms part of a global commemoration of her life in 2017, the 200th anniversary of her death. Sitting with Jane is a public art trail made up of 24 ‘BookBenches’ in and around Basingstoke, each uniquely designed and painted by a professional artist with their personal interpretation of a Jane Austen theme. The trail will link together locations – all with free public access. It will be in place between June and September j2017 and will be accompanied by a free to download app and a trail guide. After, the benches will all be auctioned in aid of Ark Cancer Centre Charity,to leave a valuable lasting legacy in the region. Sitting With Jane is part of the Hampshire Cultural Trust’s celebration of Jane Austen’s life in Hampshire.Sitting with Jane - Artist Video from Face TV on Vimeo.
Sitting with Jane
Chinese cultural thinking appreciates the smell of books as an expression of respect for knowledge. It is a harmonic relation between a library and airflow.
Sushant Passi
As we continue to fight to save our local public library which turned 80 years old last week, I’ve been thinking a lot about the lifecycle of libraries and how they change over time, and what happens when they’re gone. Among other things, this has led me to visit several “ghost” libraries – buildings originally built as libraries, but which no longer house libraries, either because they’ve been moved to new buildings or simply because the library has been closed and lost entirely to its community. Hunting for these “ghosts” has been meditative and moving. I can’t help but wonder what books were read and borrowed, what lives were changed as a result of these former libraries.
Playing by the Book
Stepped bookshelves help to divide and characterise this house just outside of Paris. We designed the interior for a family of five, who were enamoured with the room-length bookshelf at a friend’s house, where they were staying during the remodelling. We made the element a feature of the home, which we called Bookshelf House. As well as providing a place to display books, the beech wood shelves act as stair bannisters room dividers and general storage within the three-storey property. Rather than flat shelves, we designed the bookcases to look like stacked boxes. The largest unit extends from the first floor to the mezzanine, serving as the main bookshelf in the living room as well as a bannister on one side of the stairs. Its stepped top continues on the mezzanine level, where it serves as a storage cabinet. The main shelf is reflected by a large mirror on the opposite side of the living room, making books a dominant feature of the space from almost any angle.
Andrea Mosca
The Home Café chain incorporates various concept versions to offer spaces to breathe in heavily polluted areas of China. Steel bars are upcycled to become a main interior design feature. The steel bars create a series of cubic frameworks, which can be combined to shelves of different sizes. Boxes of plants, books, and lights on different levels create various densities for the interior.
Penda
Flexile is a flat-pack bookshelf which utilizes polyester textile for personalization. Flexile can be mounted in as many different ways as the user imagines.
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