SEE A STUNNINGLY SURREAL BOOKSTORE IN CHINA

 

I was thinking just today that hte book selling business has survived a horrendus shock and is now showing signs of real recovery.  That is welcome.  It went through a long two decades of intense mis placed investment and this was followed by consloidation.

I walked through Indigos in Vancouver today and half the footage was  dedicated to future junk.  I had to look for the working book shelves.  Oh well.

The book selling model needs to be rethought and built around the informed book seller who serves the customer.  Imagine a 10,000 foot facility in which publishers stock their own space along with a dedicated expert..  It certainly worked for cosmetics.  It also supports catelog sales as well.  The industry has depended on self service forever.  Maybe it is time to change and perhaps used items can also be stocked alongside as well.

A specialist book seller can stock several small publishers as well here.

Understand that the available categories are actually small in number..  so why should you compete that way?

SEE A STUNNINGLY SURREAL BOOKSTORE IN CHINA

Dujiangyan Zhongshu features gravity-defying staircases and infinite bookshelves

BY ISIS DAVIS-MARKSA view of the Dujiangyan Zhongshu bookstore (Feng Shao / X+Living)


SMITHSONIANMAG.COM | Oct. 29, 2020, 10:08 a.m.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/gorgeous-bookstore-china-creates-other-worldly-space-180976143/?

Arecently opened bookstore in southwest China looks like it came straight out of one of Dutch artist M.C. Escher’s fever dreams.


Located west of Chengdu in the Sichuan province, Dujiangyan Zhongshuge boasts spiraling staircases, curved archways and strategically placed mirrors; these architectural features work in tandem to create the illusion of an impossible space similar to the one depicted in Escher’s gravity-defying Relativity (1953).


Architect Li Xiang, founder of Shanghai-based firm X+Living, designed the roughly 10,500-square-foot bookshop, which draws inspiration from the Unesco World Heritage–listed Dujiangyan irrigation system. Certain architectural elements resemble water, nodding to the many rivers that flow through the city.

“We moved the local landscape into the indoor space,” Li tells Architectural Digest’s Elizabeth Stamp. “The project is located in Dujiangyan, which is a city with a long history of water conservancy development, so in the main area, you [can] see the construction of the dam integrated into the bookshelves.”View of spiral staircases (X+Living)

View of mirrored ceiling (X+Living)

According to a statement, the Dujiangyan store—much like Zhongshuge’s other locations—uses a mirrored ceiling to simulate a sense of limitless openness. Book-laden, ceiling-high shelves echo the curves of nature, while glossy, black-tile flooring makes reading tables scattered across the space resemble boats moored on a lake.

Visitors walking through the labyrinth-like store will find areas designed to fulfill different purposes. The children’s reading room, for instance, is replete with panda posters, bamboo bookshelves and colorful cushions.

As Li notes on Instagram, the tomes placed on the bookshelves’ highest levels are purely decorative. But all books within readers’ reach—some 80,000 volumes spanning more than 20,000 categories—are “readable,” she adds.

This isn’t X+Living’s first foray into the book world: The firm has previously created Zhongshuge branches in Guangzhou, Yangzhou, Minhang and Chongqing, among other locations across China.

View of the Dujiangyan Zhongshu bookstore (X+Living)

At the Yangzhou store, designers relied on mirrored floors and arched shelves to “create the illusion of an infinite tunnel of books,” per Atlas Obscura’s Kerry Wolfe. And in Chongqing, wrote Nick Mafi for Architectural Digest in June 2019, architectural features lent the space “an almost delirious, vertiginous” vibe.

Perhaps even more so than the new location in Dujiangyan, the Chongqing store deftly channels Escher’s surreal creations, featuring a “ladder hall” in which “mountain-shaped stairs” double as bookshelves, according to a statement.


“The clients asked me and my team to create a bookstore that was also a landmark," Li told Architectural Digest’s Mafi in 2019. “The glass ceiling enlarges the space, while creating something 

that appears more magical than it does real.”

View of Dujiangyan Zhongshu bookstore (X+Living)

View of Dujiangyan Zhongshu bookstore (X+Living)

View of Dujiangyan Zhongshu bookstore (X+Living)