Category Archives: Essays and Book Reviews

Against Designed Bookshelves: A Photo Essay

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I was once at a party with some designer shoes. They did have a person in them, but she mostly talked about the shoes, under the impression that a designer name imparted some mystic quality to them. Unfortunately, what they imparted to me was a sense that Minnie Mouse was doing well in the foot size department. Neither did they do anything for her legs, her torso, or the cut, colour, or fabric of her dress. But they were designer, and so the other guests ooed and awed while I tried to find another drink.

Unfortunately, what I like to call “designer creep” — the tendency for every consumer product to be positioned as a designed object — has infiltrated our culture to such an extent that one can no longer escape it simply by wandering off in search of gin. Beginning with the iPod in the late 90s, and buoyed by the easy credit of the pre-crash economy, design trickled down onto the high street and crept through the internet into the consciousness of average consumers. And now it’s followed me into the very last bastion of old-fashioned, unselfconscious nerdery: the library.

You can’t go a day, it seems, without running across an example of designed bookshelves. They pop up on quality book blogs and news sites, but also feature regularly in low quality “best” lists, the type of no-content content that’s so easy for time-strapped bloggers to produce. It’s not that I don’t sympathise; it can be difficult to come up with good topics on a regular basis, and an unusual or funny looking bookshelf can seem like a godsend. The problem is that few writers look at these shelves critically. Much like the Minnie Mouse shoes, they’re passed around the web being oohed and awed even though many of them barely function as bookshelves.

Yanko Design’s tagline is “Form Beyond Function”, so at least they’re honest. This gets to the heart of my problem with most designer bookcases. Design isn’t just about pushing aesthetic boundaries. It’s about making products that are beautiful and functional, whether that product is as complex as a smartphone or as simple as a ceramic pitcher.

But, in most of these bookshelf designs, function is relegated to the back-burner. The example above wastes a huge amount of space to store only fifteen, maybe thirty, volumes.  A normal set of shelves sitting in approximately the same area could hold double or triple that number of books. And all those books would be standing upright, easy to see and to pull off the shelf without pinching your fingers, and not at risk of damage because the shelf rolled and they all bumped around in their little compartments. It’s the damage-causing potential of these shelves that really drives me crazy.

This, for instance, is just terrible. So of course it won some kind of award.

“But the world is changing,” you say. “We read digitally now and don’t need to worry about damaging physical books or conserving space. We can be creative. Bookcases don’t have to be purely functional, they can represent our personalities and aspirations.”

And I agree with part of that! I’m a tech geek myself, and I appreciate the possibilities of digital reading. Not only for the books we read electronically, but for those we hold onto as physical objects. In the future there will still be physical books, but they’ll be nicer than the ones we’re used to. Instead of buying cheap paper copies of bestsellers we’ll read the latest crazes electronically. Hard copies will be produced in smaller numbers to higher standards, made to give as gifts and keep as cherished objects. Spend any time with books printed during the early modern era, or by the private presses of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and you start to see the possibilities. It’ll be the best of both worlds: free flowing digital information and beautiful physical copies of the books we love best.

So why, at precisely this moment, would you want to start buying shelves that destroy your books?

I wish this shelf, for example, was a joke. But it isn’t. I can’t find the original site for this particular model, but the same people also designed this travesty. Not a single one of the books pictured here is sitting comfortably. They’re being damaged as the dust jackets and edges of the covers wear, light attacks every surface, and the spines warp, slowly and inexorably.

We’ve also heard lots recently about bookshelf design for the “post-book world”, in which bookshelves become less about books and more about other types of objects. But does anything look happy here? I wouldn’t trust much to this curvy shelf, certainly not any antiques or objects of sentimental value, and it’s not really made to store everyday things like the sunglasses, either. This shelf just looks like a big waste of space.

But a shelf doesn’t have to be large to be a waste of space:

“I’m an idiot.”

You, too, can have a headache for only $959.

This refugee from a third-rate Cubist’s studio is Autumn, by Domodinamica. The blog where I sourced the image described it in this way,

Autum [sic] is a shelving system that gives a new take on the standard bookshelf. It is uniquely designed to give the effect of a leafless tree… With varying heights and widths you can find storage for numerous items that wouldn’t usually fit on a book shelf.

Newsflash: most items meant to go on bookshelves fit on normal bookshelves.

This example demonstrates the problem with many of these shelves: they’re designed without the books in mind. Instead of thinking “How can I make the books and the shelves look good together?” the designer wonders, “How can I make a shelf that looks cool, maybe like a tree?”. I’m not strictly opposed to cool shelves, and I like autumn trees. But once you start filling this shelf it all goes wrong. The books don’t look like scattered leaves on a tree. They ruin the lines of the case, and the case ruins the lines and beauty of the books.

Here’s another egregious example that pops up regularly:

The Bookworm by Ron Arad ticks all my rage boxes. By far one of the most widely available of these designs, it’s for sale in the MOMA shop and at a few high street retailers. I believe part of the appeal is that you can mount the shelf in any way you like, making a worm or even a spiral. This has been described as “daring and revolutionary” (see the last link), but in addition to being a waste of space, damaging to the books, and difficult to use, it’s ugly as sin. Books and other objects never look good on it — just do an image search to see people’s photos of the completed shelves. It’s the disconnect between the flowing lines of the shelf and the straight lines of the books, which end up clumped together at odd intervals. Again, I’m all for interesting, even challenging, juxtapositions where appropriate in design, but this just looks cheap and gimmicky.

The argument in these designs’ favour is that the whole point is to push boundaries. But artists, fashion designers, and engineers become great because they force on the viewer new ideas and perspectives. I’m not sure what these bookshelf designs are supposed to accomplish, but it’s certainly not that. A big round bookshelf with room for 15 books doesn’t make me question the nature of the book or its role in my life, just how to get a volume off the shelf without jamming my fingers. Though if you bought one you would have to question why you have books at all if they’re barely visible, inconveniently stored, and getting damaged by the very thing that’s supposed to protect them.

These problems are by no means restricted to bookshelves; I’ve run across lots of other design travesties in technology and home decorating. The difference is that an annoying can opener can be left harmlessly in a drawer, but once your books are broken they’re broken forever. If this is the future of “shelving systems”, just give me an e-reader and be done with it.

Library to Digital Disneyland?

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This morning I was putting the finishing touches on my anatomy illustration essay — adding high quality digital images from the Wellcome Collection and the National Library of Medicine to demonstrate many of the points I’d made in writing.  During my research I’d used these online galleries to scope out primary sources before tackling the originals, and I was grateful that they were available for research and that the images could be downloaded to add visual impact to my completed text.

Adding images to a Word document can be a bit tedious, though, so when I finished I took a quick break to scan the news online, including Stuff, the web portal of New Zealand’s Dominion Post.  Between 2006 and 2007 I lived in Wellington on a working holiday visa, and I was dismayed to see the headline ‘From Library to Digital Disneyland‘ alongside a picture of the National Library.  The beauty and mystery of the internet: in just a few seconds I had moved from the productive, academic use of a digital library to an op-ed piece attacking a digital initiative.

The article is by Jim Traue, a former chief librarian of the Alexander Turnbull Library, a specialized collection within the National Library.  The piece is in reaction to planned changes to the library, particularly a new emphasis on digitization and access to digital materials for visitors on the ground floor.  But rather than a thoughtful critique of the plan’s details, or suggestions for changes and improvements, Traue has written a reactionary spiel.  He seems to be trapped in an antiquated mindset that sees digital technology as a threat and national librarians as the guardians of cold, inaccessible buildings housing materials for the use of specialists.

One of Traue’s arguments is that it is too costly for  libraries to work directly with digital technologies:

The division of costs between the research library and the researchers and publishers is being eroded. Traditionally, the research library gathered and preserved the original documents, and the staff organised them for use by researchers, courtesy of the taxpayer.

It was up to the researchers to invest their time to convert the raw materials in the library into finished products, and for the publishers to find the money to publish and distribute them.

Now the National Library is becoming a major publisher, at an increasing cost to the taxpayer, and staff will find themselves more and more involved in the time-consuming work required to get material prepared for digital publication.

Traue seems to think that that digital imaging should be a side agenda for national libraries, rather than a driving mandate.  He needs to catch up with modernity.

Major libraries around the world are embracing digital technology.  And these libraries are joining together for mutual support and the expansion of access, as we have seen with recent programs such as Europeana and the World Digital Library.  There are important challenges associated with digitization (such as cost, access to technology and talent, and managing digital preservation) but there are also many reasons to embrace this movement.  Digital materials dramatically increase the number of people who have access to documents without the damage that accrues through handling.  They offer sophisticated new methods for approaching material, such as software assisted text and image analysis and advanced search capabilities.  Accurate digital copies can be made and circulated amongst scholars in the blink of an eye, and connections may be discerned between isolated documents that an individual researcher would never have seen side-by-side in the past.  From a preservation standpoint, high quality images can be compared to judge an item’s rate of decay and to determine if it needs conservation work, and what type.  Digital copies of rare material mean that, should the unthinkable happen, there will still be a valuable record of lost, damaged, or destroyed items.  Today, digital librarianship is not the ‘cherry on top’ that an institution can choose to explore if it has some extra cash.  It is part of the main course alongside traditional library and archival methods.  It is to the credit of the leaders at the National Library that they are not letting New Zealand fall behind the rest of the world.  (As to the ridiculous notion that it should be for-profit publishers managing the dissemination of cultural materials, I would refer you to the on-going Google Book Search controversy.)

Traue’s dismissive and uninformed attitude toward digital librarianship is annoying, but not unexpected at a time of rapid technological change.  The truly troubling part of the piece comes with his blatant derision of the public.  You can practically see the sneer on his face when he states:

Chris Szekely, the Turnbull’s chief librarian (who also holds the new position of deputy national librarian), is assuring the public that the building makeover, mass digitisation and the restructuring of the Turnbull’s services will improve access and services for researchers.

Yeah, right. Instead of the Turnbull’s staff concentrating on building and organising comprehensive collections to provide total immersion for researchers creating new publications, their time and expertise will be diverted into preparing material for digitisation in order to feed the visitors clamouring for entertainment on the ground floor Disneyland.

Traue seems to have forgotten that a national library is the repository for a shared public heritage.  Even though it is not a lending library it still has a mandate to provide, even encourage, public access, and not just for intellectuals.  In the past this was understandably difficult because the main goal is always preservation, which conflicts with access.  But technology has dramatically expanded our ability to share cultural objects.  This has worked with resounding success at the British Library, which has a public lobby and galleries complete with touch-screen monitors for the Turning the Pages initiative, allowing anyone to interact with digital facsimiles of important and beautiful books.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked through the lobby of the British Library and seen someone blissfully examining the Diamond Sutra or the Lindisfarne Gospels.  Other libraries, including the US Library of Congress, have similar programs.  It sounds like this is the model for the changes in New Zealand, and I find it difficult to comprehend how this would be ‘Disneyfying’ the library.  Surely anyone visiting a library in the first place would be seeking education and enlightenment, rather than mindless entertainment as Traue seems to imply.

Instead of insulting the general public, it might be useful to consider what these visitors could do for the library, and the important connections that could be forged between the public and the institution.  A visitor who is able to interact with the materials in the library, who has a pleasant and educational experience, makes a real connection, and comes away with an understanding of the institution’s purpose is much more likely to support library initiatives and government funding.  That is not to say that the public face should be put ahead of other missions such as collection, preservation, and research just for an increase in visitors and funding.  But Traue has offered no hard evidence that the plan will negatively affect other library goals.

I’m not privy to what’s happening at the National Library of New Zealand.  There could be legitimate concerns about the way that change is being introduced or how money is being spent.  But you wouldn’t know that from this piece, which has little to say of substance.  Reactionary diatribes, like futurist theories of digital utopias, should not be given the spotlight.  National institutions, government, and the media need to engage in thoughtful dialogues about how technology is incorporated into the missions of libraries.  And rather than avoiding change, libraries must approach the future positively and explore new ways of interacting with the people they serve, whether they have PhDs or not.