Truly Deeply/Madly

We’ve been hav­ing some lengthy and colour­ful dis­cus­sions about the mean­ing of the word Obses­sion. Some have argued that obses­sions are pri­mar­ily of neg­a­tive influ­ence; they are when things go too far. I, on the other hand believe that we all have the seeds of obses­sion within our human DNA. That obses­sion is within our nature, some­times recessed, and other times not so much. As such, there’s noth­ing wrong with a lit­tle over enthu­si­as­tic pur­suit of per­sonal inter­est, in fact I think it makes for a more inter­est­ing per­sonal brand.

I am also a book lover. There’s some­thing phys­i­cal about the feel of a good, solid book in your hand and the turn­ing of pages between thumb and fin­ger. Up until now I’ve felt slightly self con­scious about my ever grow­ing col­lec­tion of books I couldn’t pos­si­bly part with, includ­ing a weary vol­ume of ‘One Flew Over the Cuck­oos Nest’ from my school days. Up until now.

Recently returned from a trip through the land of Book Obses­sion I have a new per­spec­tive on book love. I have always thought the selec­tion of books on a person’s book shelf was an inti­mately per­sonal expres­sion. I now have an appre­ci­a­tion of how a healthy book obses­sion can tran­scend con­tent and cat­e­gory, and move into the aes­thetic sphere.

Buckle-in for a brief tour of the colour­ful world of book obsession.

The rain­bow book­shelf takes library organ­i­sa­tion to the next level. The shelf below not only orders books by colour of their book jacket, but does so in the order of the colours of a rain­bow. This approach is appar­ently quite pop­u­lar as demon­strated by a Flickr photo pool called “The Rain­bow of Books” in which peo­ple post pho­tos of their colour book fil­ing activities.

The Ex lib­ris is a cof­fee table with book shelf built-in. Ital­ian fur­ni­ture design­ers MOCO launched the table at the Mai­son & Object in France, Jan­u­ary 25–29, 2008.

Lon­don is one of the most expen­sive cities in the world to live, it is well known for it’s small homes and imag­i­na­tive use of space. From these restric­tions was borne the inno­v­a­tive library stair­case, designed to house a large library, eas­ily accessed when­ever climb­ing or descend­ing the stairs.

The Book­man, is an engag­ing, yet func­tional book­shelf designed by Eng­lish artist Kazmierz Szmauz. The Book­man is avail­able in three dif­fer­ent pos­tures, and while it takes-up more space than a tra­di­tional book­shelf who wouldn’t give-up a lit­tle wall-space for the extra personality?

Japan­ese designer Sakura Adachi has cre­ated this bolt-hole for books and book lovers. The Cave is a book­shelf designed for those who love to retreat into their own world of read­ing. Avid read­ers will love retreat­ing into this lit­tle library pod to be at one with their books.

My per­sonal favourite is the Mobile Library Venezue­lan style. Old school as they come, kids in rural vil­lages in the foothills of the Andes have their library books deliv­ered by four-legged mobile libraries. In Kenya, the Camel Library Ser­vice does the same job. Author Masha Hamil­ton has writ­ten a book about the Camel Library Ser­vice called “The Camel Bookmobile”.

The Nobody & Co. Bib­liochaise chair is the lat­est ver­sion of the stay at home book shelf; with the right library and a phone to order home deliv­ery pizza, you may never need to move.

Finally, for the book lover who likes to travel, this bou­tique hotel is located in the heart of New York City on Madi­son Avenue and 41st Street. The hotel is home to more than 6,000 books — includ­ing the largest col­lec­tion of rare books in NYC. Each floor is named library style from Social Sci­ence, Lan­guage and Math to Sci­ence, Tech­nol­ogy, etc.

Dave

Tags: Brand Agency, Brand Design, Brand Strategy, Corporate Image, Creative Ideas, Design, Designer Chairs, Graphic Design Melbourne, Interior Design

This entry was posted on Monday, August 3rd, 2009 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Creative, Experiences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.