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5. Hang around : Bookwave is a flowy hanging storage bookshelf made from felt and stainless steel. Designed by Mehtap Obuz and also inspired by a beehive, it can triple up as room divider and curtain, or even store clothes. -
7. Piping hot : Available in all shapes and sizes are Stella Bleu’s bookshelves are made from reclaimed iron pipes. Salvaged from scrapyards and individually cut-and-welded by hand, some come with light fittings too. -
3. Square cubed : Which way is up? Italian designer Marco Ripa’s Who’s Next magazine rack keeps you guessing with its cube-shaped frame cut through by a square, enabling you to place you mags any which weird way you want. Magic. -
9. Reader profile : Long-bin Chen carves stacked books, magazines and newspapers into sculptures. He sees his work as discussions about consumption, waste and that long-ago time before digital take-over! -
6. Reading wall : Rip out your supporting wall, build a top-to-bottom bookcase in its place with a staircase cosying up to the books, and you’re shelf-set for life. Dutch architects, Shift, transformed their Rotterdam client’s townhouse like this. -
10. Bookshelf massacre : Get out the chainsaw and mess with paper like SA artist Wim Botha in Study for the Epic Mundane. No, not really. But it’s a plan if you are artistically minded, have stacks of unwanted books lying around and a garage stocked with the necessary tools... -
1. Step up : Pick your read off this pretty clever one-bar ladder-bookshelf. Designed by Marie Dessaunt and called Etagère de Coin, it happily plays house to all sorts of other special stuff too. -
2. Have a hive : Local design team Thingking drew inspiration from the bees with their Honeycomb Shelf. Its hexagon units have more than enough room for books and all sorts of other stuff. -
4. Bendy bracket : Designer Natascha Harra-Frischkorn of Hafriko developed this nifty and flexible wooden shelf, Chuck. It adapts to hold any object and can even be stretched to take on different shapes. -
8. Go pomo : A bookshelf out of books? How post modern! The Book Bookshelf by Not Tom design consultancy was inspired by the fact that we still have an emotional bond to many of the books we simply don't have space for. So why not use them to store even more books?
WORDS Debbie Loots
Tuning into Cape Town’s Open Book Festival vibe, on until Wednesday 11 September, we know that armloads of fab reads are going to homes where bookshelves are either in poor supply or bulging at the sides. So here are some super cool bookshelf finds in aid of homeless books everywhere and, if you need to make space by tossing stuff first, we also have some creative ways to take those excess pages to unusual new places – although also have a look at Keri Muller’s book artistry here and the Spier Arts Academy’s book floor here.
- www.mariedessuant.com
- www.thingking.co.za
- www.marcoripa.it
- www.cargocollective.com/hafriko
- ilio.eu
- www.shifta.nl
- www.stellableudesigns.com
- not-tom.com
- tmp.longbinchen.com
- www.stevenson.info/artists/botha.html
See how writer and journalist Lin Sampson has furnished her home with books.
