Stairway to Heaven
Addiction is a big problem for a lot of people. It starts at a vulnerable age with a copy of Tom’s Secret Garden recommended by a kindly librarian. You move on to Just William and The Ghost of Thomas Kempe and before long you are in real trouble, your whole adult life blighted. So if you are the sort of person who gets caught hiding hardbacks in your hair, taking them out for a quick furtive read at public events, or if you are constantly on the run from the paperazzi* and people keep trying to make you go to rehab (or even a charity shop with a huge box of duplicates) this might just be a short-term answer: hide the books in the stairs. Honestly I am tempted to go through the hell that is building a loft extension just to be able to do this (surly nod of appreciation to Boing Boing):
Here’s the link again.
*You see what I did there?
Posted by Chris Routledge
That is truly amazing. Enid Stubin (Our Spy in NY) will be drooling when she sees those pics — the ultimate solution for the space-challenged bibliophile. Move over Kermit; the stairway is now the best room in the house. But for messy sods (like me), it’s all too risky. The amount of coffee that gets hurled about on our stairs… And there’s the mud off the fields. And dog hair. Books would be coated in a weird primitive render in no time.
But the pics look beautiful.
Do you think the steps are themed, with improving books on the ‘naughty step’ (anyone remember the terrifying ‘Strewelpeter’?) and mountaineering/improving books at the top? George Eliot and Hardy, Malamud and Tolstoy perhaps would be camped somewhere halfway, toiling upwards and downwards. Where would Dante go?
I am so going to try and persuade my boyfriend to build this in our house!
I’d knock the house down and start again for a set of stairs like this.
I’m tempted to get an attic conversion just so I have more stairs. BRILLIANT idea.