Sigh...why do designers hate books so much?

I like the brand name: Sloom en Slordig: Sluggish and Messy.

what the heck is going on lately with all this recent horrid and sadistic "bookshelf design"??? i like standard bookselves as they are. painted white with some nice and subtle molding on top is lovely to me. if it ain't broke, don't fix it! these (ahem) designers just seem desperate to try to come up with new-fangled ways to store and display books. i think they'd be better off focusing on designing for real storage/decor problems.

This is clearly not proposed as sensible method of organization.

Actually, those photos are misleading on Design Milk. The first one is one book case. The subsequent piles are another version, not the same book case.

Sometimes furniture is designed more as avantgarde art objects rather than furniture to be used as its most basic function. I appreciate both types of creations, if done well. And this is a fun art object, best intended for some art collector with scads of space. Not for the majority of us apartment dwellers with more prosaic uses for our bookshelves that must multi-task.

Yes, it would be nice if designers could all design for the majority, but boy the world would be much less fun, if we didn't get concepts like these and be able to see these in high-end stores and museums.
And we still have plenty of great options for real book storage, such as the Vitsoe 606, the Expedit, the Elfa, the USM, etc.

Hurray for variety and imagination!

It's rather like the Paris fashion shows. I wouldn't expect to see the bizarrre offerings actually worn anywhere. They're mainly to spark imagination, to get us thinking in a different direction. In this case, it's, "let's see bookcases in a whole new light..."

There are some things new that are progressive for both function and form: Umbra's invisible shelves, Rainaldi's vertical shelves etc... I agree some things are coming out that clearly have no respect for function. I have no problem with the designers exploring and creating the depths and heights of their imaginations. I'm a bit shocked at the manufacturers lack of respect for function. Do they really think the market has no respect for it? They are supposed to be in this for some sort of profit.

I really like this in the straight formation shown in this pic (not too keen on the heaps version in the link) - and I love books. I have a couple of thousand and I see this as a sculptural way to organise those which have escaped from their room until I can put them back where they belong.

Do they all come together as a set, or can you get just a few in different sizes? Because I could see it as a nifty magazine shelf in my bathroom.