MUGI – My Unique Gift Idea

Here at My Unique Gift Idea we love seeing original functions for recycled books, so we were really psyched to see that Manhattan’s McNally Jackson Books has integrated an incredible array of bound book decor in their new renovated cafe.

The independent bookseller joined forces with Front Studio to renovate the bookstore’s existing café into a “place evocative of literature.” The collaboration establishes a new identity, celebrating intuitive connections between programmatic functions and the act of reading.

The café is rather small but provides enough space for four distinct seating areas and an ordering station. Above the center seating area are a series of randomly located light fixtures interlaced with a sporadic placement of similar extending cords but no lamps. Each fixture and cord penetrates one used book each and creates the semblance “as if a pile of books had been thrown into the sky and frozen.”

The curved wall behind the bench seating is textured in a wall-covering solely made out of open-spine books. At first sight, one would believe that there are no tables in this area, however snapped to the papered wall are hinged wooden pull-down folding surfaces. Like antique schoolhouse writing desks, the tables are designed to project the form of a folded book when closed.
Above the ordering station is the menu filled with food-related quotes and another series of the same light fixtures, in this location each fixture holds a large stack of different editions of the same book.

McNally Jackson Books Café is definetely worth a visit. According to the statement on their Website:

“our coffee is fair trade, our paper products recycled and all of our pastries are bio-degradable”.