If you’re the type who collects lots of reading materials, you most likely want to have them proudly displayed or at the very least neatly collected. It might seem counter-intuitive given how most people read, but the most space-efficient way to arrange books would be to have them stand upright, their spines vertical and visible for everyone to see. Of course, they only look neat if they’re standing straight up and packed tightly, but that image literally falls down the moment you remove a single book.
Bookends are objects made for this singular purpose, and while that purpose might indeed be trivial, it’s also an opportunity for more creative designs. Yes, some bookends look like elaborate sculptures and works of art that, while eye-catching, don’t always make smart use of available space. These rather unusual bookends, however, marry Japanese minimalism and engineering to deliver a one-of-a-kind design that won’t let your books down even if you take away some of them.
Designer:
The simplest bookend design is a pair of L-shaped sheets of metal on opposite ends of a row of standing books. These keep the books upright but only if the books are crammed together. Remove one and the books start to lean. You can always adjust the bookends, of course, but doing that every time you take out one book is tedious and inefficient.
The Firm Book End has a solution that’s both clever and odd. Rather than two pieces standing on opposite ends, it’s a single long piece that has teeth-like stoppers that can be flipped up. When books are inserted into the bookend, the stoppers are pushed up as well. Just like with regular bookends, adjacent books can keep each other standing upright, but removing any one of them won’t suddenly make the pile lean or fall.
The trick can be found in those stoppers, which flip back down when there’s nothing pushing it up. In other words, once a book is removed, the previously lifted stopper falls down and practically takes the place of that book, keeping the other books beside it still standing tall. It sounds rather over-engineered, and it probably is, but it’s still an interesting application of simple mechanics for such a simple problem.
The Firm Book End also doesn’t take up any space to the side of books, allowing you to squeeze a bit more material in between. Even better, you can actually connect a few of these to make a longer row, but sadly you can’t divide them into narrower parts. The design also doesn’t take into account books that are too thin or too thick to fit perfectly in between stoppers, so there might still be some slightly leaning books anyway.
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