Being a geek, I am obsessed with books. I read a lot, and very quickly. And I really love to reread. Preferably several dozen times. So while I appreciate in theory how awesome libraries are, I don’t use them often because they insist I give the books back. This sort of makes me sound like a jerk, but it’s not the sharing part I dislike; I love to convince other people to read things. I just want them to come back to me eventually. I was probably a librarian in a past life. Or I am an irregular librarian in this life. I daydream of having walls of books in my future house, and my friends who spend more time on tumblr than I do regularly send me images to drool and laugh over.
But that is in the future, and my current transient living style demands that I leave the majority of my books in my parents house. And while every few weeks I swap them out, this means I have a constantly changing number of books in the same physical space as me. Sometimes my poor small bookshelf has like nothing (if I am reading a series that is on my kindle) and sometimes there are piles of them everywhere. Currently there is a huge number in a laundry basket. Which is why this is clearly the bookshelf for me.
It expands! Which is why it’s named the “Expando”. Pushed together to fit like a puzzle it is a good size, but you can slide the two pieces apart and you end up with even more space. So on weeks that I have a lot of books they will all fit, and on others I can push them together and my books won’t fall over. It can turn corners, which is nice for a small space (see images below). The L shape allows for both large and small items, which is great for oversize design books. Plus it is such a clean design, but still interesting to look at. This sort of flexibility is something I love in furniture. It’s annoying to be stuck arranging furniture in limited ways because the I don’t want to saw it into pieces.
I saw it on Fab.com and then it took me 20 minutes to figure out what the company was. It’s listed as “TheErgoOffice” on Fab, but this company doesn’t have a website of its own. It took me a while to trace it back to Jesper Office where the shelf is part of the 100 Collection. And even on their site, the main pictures feature several of the shelves which threw me off. This is a great additional feature, but it was confusing when I was looking for a much smaller thing and the pictures were tiny. They need to work on their branding and website. It’s like they didn’t want the credit for their design. Which is silly because it’s great. The world needs more simple clever ideas.
Chic + Geek 