Functional Furniture

By chance I have come upon two descriptions I will share with you. The first is for the diner; the second for the reader.

The Dining Table

    “The family table was unlike any I ever saw before. It was circular, and the central part of it revolved. When any one wished to be helped, he placed his plate on the revolving part, which was whirled around to the host, and then whirled back with its new load. Thus every plate was revolved into place, without the assistance of any of the family.”

   

    This quotation is from John Muir who found such a table in the backwoods of Georgia, c1867. From: A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, pp.59-60. It may have resembled a more rustic version of this:

The Book Wheel

    Admittedly, this device may have been rendered obsolete by the internet, but it is nonetheless ingenious.

    “Princeton historian Anthony Grafton may win the contest for most interesting home reference section, thanks to a six foot-tall “book wheel” or “reading wheel,” modeled on a contraption designed by European scholars in the late sixteenth century. “Think of a small Ferris wheel,” writes a reporter who has seen it, “ with shelves instead of seats”; the shelves rotate, like the cars on a Ferris wheel, so that the books always remain upright. “From his seat he can rotate any one of eight shelves into view by spinning the wheel.”

    From: “Tell Me How You Organize Your Books,” Chapter 7 ½, in You Could Look it Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia, Jack Lynch, pp.104-105. This photograph is found in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, April 4, 2007.