The elite posteriors at the University of Oxford will soon get a new resting place, thanks to the Bodleian Libraries Chair Competition, which has just announced its winner.
The victorious oak seat, designed Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby with the manufacturer Isokon Plus, features “a strong vertical timber, echoing the spines of the books on shelves,†attached to a sled base, according to a news release, which also noted the chair’s suitability to “complex reader requirements.†It will be installed in the newly refurbished Weston Library (formerly the New Bodleian, built in the 1930s), when it reopens in October 2014.
The design, chosen from more than 60 entries, is only the third new chair developed specifically for the Bodleian since 1756, when it acquired three dozen Windsor chairs to supplement its raised reading lecterns and low wooden benches attached to bookshelves, to which books were chained, according to an article about the competition in The Guardian.
And the first students at the university, whose origins date back at least to the 11th century, probably wouldn’t have sat reading in book-lined rooms at all.
“In medieval times, you would have had a book room, and then you would take the book out to the cloister to read,†Chris Fletcher, the Bodleian’s keeper of special collections, told The Guardian. “It’s only in the post-medieval period that people started to read while sitting in the book rooms.â€
