Favorite chair designs for book lovers

Hey book lovers, please take a seat.

And if you’d like, please take a seat with books inside of it.

The annual Salone del Mobile furniture fair begins in Milan next week, and to launch its coverage of the event, the Atlantic Cities website has a list of “10 chair designs for people who really love their books” from the site Architizer.

Among my favorites is the Sunflower Chair by the designers He Mu and Zhang Qian, which the Chair Blog says was presented last year as a part of a retrospective on Chinese chair design.

The German designer Nils Holger Moormann’s chairs are literary twice-over -- they store books and are also a pun. His Easy Reader chairs have storage space and have a wheel that allow them to be rolled around a room a la “Easy Rider.”

We can’t help but notice that most of the designs collected by Atlantic Cities are by European firms, as if to speak to the special place space-hungry book collections have in the homes of space-starved Europeans.

Archive II is a huge wooden wheel that’s filled with books -- you sit in the middle -- and is part of a suite of book-inspired pieces by the David Garcia Studio of Denmark.

The firm says that the series is meant to “investigate space and books and the traditional relationships that humans have to books.” The collection includes a “censored book stand” in which “the books close suddenly if anyone approaches.”

Most of the chairs will not be in Milan this year. But if they were all assembled in one place, the show-stopper might be the Bookworm (or Boekenwurm in Dutch) by the Rotterdam design firm Atelier 010.

The Bookworm more accurately resembles a huge bookshelf that’s been twisted into a boomerang-shaped spiral.

As the website Architizer puts it, the piece is “part bookshelf, part chair, and even part room. The design features a nook-like enclosure that’s ideal for lounging and picking up a book -- one’s always in reach!”

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