Some observation's about Rainaldi's Sapiens

I love ideas, hence I also love books. Living in an apartment in the city, unfortunately, poses some limitations based on the square meter pricing of housing, so this makes books a valuable proposition. Or alternatively it makes the priority of packing books as efficiently as possible a higher priority. Another criteria stemming from the initial observation is that I do not like to wrap books into shelves that hide the books. Put these two things together and I have had a problem of finding good shelves for a while.

Some years ago I ran into a rather elegant spine bookshelf by Bruno Rainaldi, called the Ptolomeo. The shelf has multiple variations with the X4 with the lie-flat configuration affording an incredible amount of storage efficiency, but alas, it was not one to easily fit into my apartment, and at that moment of time also the price seemed quite steep. Fortunately I rather quickly discovered that Rainaldi had created a slightly cheaper alternative for Gruppo Sintesi called the Sapiens bookshelf, and I immediately jumped on board and ordered the tallest, nearly two meter tall variant of it. As of today I have two of them and a third one as a smaller variant.

In general I am very satisfied with the Sapiens shelves, although they seem to split opinions a bit. But what is not to like about a stack of books? There were, however, some observations that I had not immediately thought of when I ordered the shelves. Firstly, the shelves stand alone, which is nice, but creates an interesting situation where the spine stands rather far away from the wall. This is fine, but only if you do not view the shelf from the sides. In practice this ended up causing some head scratching and compromises in my current apartment, and over a longer period of time in my next apartments I will from the get-go just probably end up getting the wall-mountable Ptolomeo shelves, since it will solve the problem and also make the shelf that much more compact.

A second observation was a corollary to the first one: a single Sapiens shelf looks good in a corner or comparable location where it is not as apparently obvious how far away it stands from the wall (i.e. no direct views from the sides), but a single shelf against a larger wall is a bit lost. Fortunately this is relatively easily overcome by multiple shelves side by side. I think this is due to the fact that a lot of the "marketing" or interior decoration pictures of the shelf are of spaces that are not really too compact and hence can dedicate lots of air and space to bring the focus to the single shelf. In practice, especially in smaller apartments, this type of situation rarely happens and hence there is force in numbers.

Aside from these caveats, I still very much like the product and at least for me the concept of spine bookshelves was finally an answer to a long standing problem. Brilliant design based on a simple insight. And the spines of the books are for once in the right orientation as well.