Concerned that your stacks of coffee table books and magazines look a bit disheveled? German designer Kevin Krumnikl’s low table, Library, provides storage spaces for printed materials of various sizes. Organization and orderliness can be achieved through compartmentalization, creating designated homes for your materials and enabling them to be arranged by category or form. Rather than typifying clutter, the presence of printed materials fills voids within the table’s chiseled shape.

Library. Designed by Kevin Krumnikl.

Library serves as a book and a magazine shelf despite its non-traditional form. Three voids within the surface display your most praiseworthy literature. Inserted horizontally, these book and magazine covers become integrated into the table’s surface: celebrated and visible components of the piece. Their presence completes the table, filling in its voids to create a solid cuboid. With the purchase of new books and magazines, the table is updated. A cavity at the corner of the table provides less visible storage for the remainder of your literature- its larger form fitting newspapers and other materials of varying sizes.

Library (160 x 80 x 30 cm) is available in black painted MDF, oak or seki. As shown in the images, the voids within the table can also be fitted with planters or open boxes. The various finish options, the potential for optional compartments and the personalization that occurs through usage provide for a variety of distinguished looks. Regardless, it maintains a clean and modern aesthetic that will keep your belongings in order. Cornerstone, also designed by Krumnikl Environment, is more simplified with only a single notch cut out of the corner to provide placement for a glass insert (a planter, or maybe even a fish tank?). Cornerstone is available only in black painted MDF.

The options for storing books are seemingly infinite. From Reinier de Jong’s expandable bookcase REK to Kaspar Hamacher’s The Leather Belt and The Board, and lastly the lazy-susan (esque) Giralot designed by Stefano Bettio for Bellato, it is obvious that bookshelves come in all shapes and sizes. Krumnikl’s Library offers an entirely different approach to the storage of printed materials, deviating from the “bookshelf” form altogether. The result is innovative, modern and orderly – no wall space required.