We here at GOOD are all for repurposing objects, but who knew that bookshelves that double as coffins are a thing? Just in time for Halloween, Jeff O’Neal, editor at Book Riot stumbled across one from Ibis, a funeral products company in The Netherlands.
While you’re alive, the coffin innocuously holds your dog-eared copies of Dracula and Frankenstein, like so:
It looks like pretty much any bookcase you could pick up at your local IKEA, right? But when you inevitably keel over, the shelves pull forward, your, ahem, corpse goes in, and someone else simply fits the shelves together across the top to form the lid.
Cabinet maker Hans Rademaker first began making these for Ibis in 1994. He says he came up with the coffin bookcase because,
“When you visit people in their homes you can see from their bookcases what their interests are: the contents of a bookcase are a reflection of someone’s life. Just as a bookcase is the shell for the books, the body is the shell for a person’s ideas. When I die my books will remain behind and I hope my ideas, that I have tried to convey, will go on living in others. The shell of my body will disappear, together with the coffin.”
If this idea of a bookshelf coffin catches your eco-conscious, albeit morbid fancy, the good news is there are DIY instructions for making your own version over at Dornob. After you die, instead of leaving your relatives the responsibility of “sorting out which coffin to buy, they can simply take apart your shelf system and construct it out of already-purchased parts.”
Creeped out yet? Think of it this way: There is something rather nice about a return to the “bury me in a plain pine box” vibe here. At the very least, if you have one of these, it could be quite a conversation starter at your annual Halloween party.
Photos courtesy of Ibis
