If you could command your fondest literary desires to drop from the sky, which from among that doubtless exhaustive accounting would you require first? Speaking as a confirmed bibliophile with a veritable sphere of titles perpetually floating around my grey matter, I must admit that the choice is daunting. Yet the first contenders would definitely include a trio of Italo Calvino's greatest accomplishments-Invisible Cities, Cosmicomics, and The Baron in the Trees-not only because these are great representative examples of the best in 20th. Century literature, but also because they're each thematically suited to the levitational antics of Adrian De Melo's Upside Down Bookcase.

Upside Down. Designed by Adrien De Melo.

Inverted Storage for Inventive Books

De Melo's intriguing Upside Down doesn't exactly invert the typical equation of the bookcase, but it does put an unusual gloss on it. In contrast to the usual floor bound, solid-backed affair, De Melo's contribution to the genre is suspended from on high-the individual (and custom-sized) niches constructed from a frame of stainless steel then wrapped in the softening contours of translucent polyurethane. Each of De Melo's suspended columns are "strapped in," as it were, and elegantly draped from the rafters of Paris' Lieu du Design (from Jan. 21 to 25), until the impending transfer to their permanent home at the Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, where, from February onward, they will offer Vuitton's own brand of literary delight.

Whether that entity's proclivities will include the Calvino trio mentioned above is up to conjecture but somewhat in doubt, given the locale is France rather than Calvino's Italy. Even so, the ethereality of those books would make them difficult to pass by, since they each represent a different species of literary lightness-in order, geographical, geopolitical, and celestial, making them an idealized type of cerebral adornment for De Melo's intriguing new brand of levitational storage and display.

Via FrameMag.