At the moment, we have three 7' tall bookshelves unjustly lingering inside a U-Haul van that's parked in our driveway. We are, as you might have surmised, in the middle of unpacking, after the tedious job of moving. It's all unpleasantness around here-but it's especially depressing to have books packed away in boxes labeled "Fiction A-C" and "Bestiaries/Fairy Tales." These tomes need to be freed from their prison sentence, an act that requires brute strength, which I am decidedly lacking at the moment.

Bollicine Totem. Designed by Linfa Design.

So the collection will remain in limbo until the heavy and ungainly bookcases can de safely relocated. Which brings me to my next point: why on earth do we have these excessively large bookshelves anyway? Isn't there a better way to house a library?

Well, Italian furniture company Linfa Design sure thinks so. Their Bollicine Totem bookshelf stacks wonderfully manageable cubes atop one another (hence the totem of the name). The Bollicine comes from the circular "window" that the books can use to look out from (should they be animated when we're not looking). The word bollicine means bubbles in Italian, and the cleverly placed circle does give the shelving a measure of playful motion-the boxes seem to be floating toward the sky in a type of literary aquarium. What thoughts will rise to the surface depend on the contents of your library-cubes full of the hallucinatory visions of Huxley and Ram Dass might inspire existential musings. Bollicine Totem is the creation of Romani Saccani Architetti Associati for Linfa Design, who hopes their products will "awaken your soul's innermost passion."

Via Bookshelf Blog.