Complimentary white-glove delivery on orders above $2,000 · Every seam inspected twice

Jarpet & Japes
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Living

The Jookshelf

Denim has no compressive strength. We are not going to pretend otherwise.

$3,150

Wall-fixing kit included and not optional.

Wash
Request a swatch set

Every shelf in a Jookshelf is a steel plate. The denim is a sleeve over that plate, tensioned and closed at the back edge where you will never see the seam. We say this plainly and early because the alternative — letting a customer assume the fabric is holding their books up — is the kind of ambiguity that ends with a collapsed case and a very reasonable complaint.

Development

Eleven months measuring books

Nobody could tell us what a shelf of books weighs. Published figures range from twenty to fifty pounds per linear foot and none of them specify whether the books are paperbacks or a run of bound quarterlies. So we weighed shelves. We weighed our own, then our families’, then we asked a secondhand dealer in Greensboro if we could weigh his, which took a full Saturday and cost us lunch for four. The heaviest real shelf we found was 41 lb. per foot. We rated the Jookshelf to 60 and stopped worrying.

  • 11 Months measuring books
  • 41 lb Heaviest real shelf found
  • 60 lb Per foot, rated

The prototype that bowed

Our first Jookshelf used fabric-wrapped MDF, which is how almost anyone would build this, and which held up beautifully in the workshop for about six weeks. Then it bowed fourteen millimetres in the middle under an ordinary load of hardbacks, and a bowed shelf does not recover. It stays bowed, and every month it gets a little worse, and eventually you have a piece of furniture that is visibly ashamed of itself.

The current shelf is a folded steel plate, four millimetres, with the denim sleeved over it and drawn closed along the rear edge. Deflection at full rated load is 1.1 mm, which is below the threshold at which a human eye reads a shelf as sagging. It costs more than MDF and it means the Jookshelf weighs 140 lb. empty. We consider both of those to be the price of the thing not embarrassing you.

In the crate

  • Two-point wall restraint kit, with fixings for masonry and stud
  • Five sleeved steel shelves, individually numbered to their bay
  • A stitched log card recording each donor garment
  • Spare sleeving from your run
  • Adjustable shelf heights. The bays are fixed and that is what makes it rigid.
  • Any suggestion that you should skip the wall restraint.

Ownership

Care

  1. Fit the wall restraint before you load a single book.
  2. Vacuum the shelf faces quarterly with a brush head.
  3. Do not slide books across a shelf. Lift them; denim scuffs.
  4. Expect the front edges to lighten first, from hands and spines.

Questions we are asked

Before you commit

Can I actually put books on it?

Yes. That is the entire purpose of the object and we have made our peace with being asked.

Why is the wall restraint not optional?

A 71-inch case with 300 lb. of books in it is a tipping hazard, and no amount of steel in the shelves changes that. We will not ship without the kit and we would rather you did not buy a Jookshelf than install one without it.

Can the shelves be moved?

No. The bays are welded. Adjustable shelving requires a slotted upright, a slotted upright is a weak upright, and we would rather give you a case that does one arrangement properly.

What happens if a sleeve tears?

Lift the shelf out, post the sleeve to us, and we return it re-sleeved within three weeks in matched wash. The steel core is unaffected and the case stays usable with four shelves in the meantime.

Does it smell of anything?

For about three weeks, faintly, of clean cotton. It fades. Several owners have written to ask whether we can make it not fade, and we cannot, and we are not going to add a fragrance to a bookcase.

Pairs with

The rest of the room

The Jouch photographed straight on against a white studio wall

The Jouch

$4,280

Three-seat sofa · 41 pairs · Kiln-dried ash frame