Yet another 60s DIY project from the The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement, Greystone Press, 1970. While the bookshelf directly above is cringe-worthy (almost in the so bad it’s good category, but not quite), it could be very mod if it were updated and re-made properly with more attractive materials. One advantage of pole shelving is that unlike wall-mounted shelving (previous post), you can bring it out from the wall and let it function as a room divider. If you do want to place it against a wall, the fact that it is anchored from floor to ceiling means that you don’t have to screw into the wall, either when you’re not allowed to alter the wall in a rental, or when your plaster wall is disintegrating and too weak to support heavy shelves. See some pole-mounted cado-style shelving here. The trick is to figure out how to anchor your poles – once you’ve done that, suspending the shelves is easy and there are many ways to do it. Some Apartment Therapy tips here and we found a blog called Pole Shelving which shows a number of styles and provides many links to tutorials. Below, from Time Life: aluminum poles used as room divider in New York apartment, has three pole shelves held on by clamps. Taken in December 1953 by photographer Peter Stackpole, the bookshelf cost $142.50 at the time and were made by a company called Polecats Inc. Rakks and ISS are two big current suppliers of these systems. But somehow the 50s example has a bit more style.

Hey, look! In the NYT recently:

Tutorial for box shelves on poles made from cheap threaded rod, tubes and nuts by thinkcorps:

Tags: bookshelf, bookshelves, ISS, pole shelves, pole shelving, Polecats, Rakk, room divider, room dividers, shelving, storage, Time Life

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 5:37 pm and is filed under DIY, design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.