As it is? Mm, not. If the bottom expanded as well as the top, very hot!

"until it reaches its physical limit."

-- you mean, "until the whole thing falls over."

If the weight of the items isn't perfectly balanced, it's a disaster waiting to happen.

Just
Get
Another
Bookcase

Yet another product for people who don't REALLY like their books. Witty. Useless.

Because that won't fall over the minute your cat decides it's jungle-gym play time in the home office...

This is way too weird...

I suspect that the angle of the shelf when expanded would put too much pressure on the spines of the books (over time) and cause them to weaken. It doesn't seem like a good idea for stoarge of books that you actually want to keep.

This is super cute and innovative. It's the surrealist physical interpretation of "I've got more books than I know what to do with" and would look great in the right environment. I wish the bookcase had more color, as well as the overall styling for the photoshoot, but I guess white was the best way to showcase the concept.

Frankie says relax.

I think it's kind of a cute gimmick, but seriously, Apartment Therapy tends to means to encourage people to live well within their spaces and keep only the stuff that really means something to them, and this bookshelf looks like some precariously expanding thing that reminds me of elastic pants -- something that lets you bloat until it's just not safe.

Typo-alarm: Schoellhammer and Platzhalter ;)

i think i know what the man is trying to demonstrate but to me, he looks like he's an angry candy cane maker. something went afoul in the candy cane striping process. the striper had a malfunction. and there was an explosion. this frustrates him because it's not the first time the machinery has broken down and he's deathly afraid of getting laid off during this tenuous time. especially so close to Christmas. In anger, he pulled his bookcase apart.

LOL heather. I thought he tried to decorate the bookshelf but it expanded with all the books and popped the garland.

I'm worried about it structurally. It looks topheavy and I can't imagine how it would be stable.

Nothing useful to contribute here, just cracking up at heather's ad copy and the elastic pants... the first thing I thought was that the photos complement the silliness of the design perfectly: the girl seems to contemplate the difficult problem of having more nondescript objects covered in matching beige or white paper than her bookcase can accommodate, and then - voilà! The smugly introduced, structurally unsound solution, which could also possibly damage your floors!

Yeah, White... my thoughts, also. Where does the expanding weight rest "evenly?" My mind doesn't calculate this stuff scientifically but at a glance it looks hideously unsteady (maybe just hideous).

Playful, perhaps, but way impractical and certainly far from my preferred aesthetic... and even if it was, Curtis' visual would've ruined it for me. *laughing*

For a similar floor footprint of the "maxed out" book case, you could have two book cases.

But Max, what would you do if you were living in the bottom of a boat and had "V" shaped walls??? Heh.

Yeah, I gotta agree that a second bookcase (or culling the collection) would solve the problem more stably. Clever idea, tho.

cool idea! but i think id feel edgy sitting in the same room with them.

cool gag, yes... nice looking furniture, nope, sorry