Dragon Bookends, Head and Tail

NEIGHBOUR 001 did not ask. It came up through the shelf, took the whole middle row, and went back to sleep with your paperbacks inside it.

It does not sit on the shelf. It lives in it.

The head comes out of one end, jaw open, horns swept back, stone still breaking away from its shoulders. The tail leaves at the other, a coiled and spined whip with one claw still planted on the base.

Put them at either end of a row and the books stop being books. They are the middle of a dragon, and every person who walks past your bookcase will work that out in about a second and a half.

The rock is not a mount. It is the moment it broke through.

Most dragon bookends are a flat plate with a head glued to the front. This one is a slab of fractured stone with an animal forcing its way out of it, and the cracks run right out to the edges of the panel. The flat back sits against the books, the base runs underneath them, and the weight of the row holds the whole thing down. It is a working bookend that happens to be a sculpture, not a sculpture propped up next to one.

Detail you can lose ten minutes to

Individual scales down the neck and along the tail. Separate teeth in an open jaw. Spines, brow ridges, a horn that curves back over the skull, claws that wrap the stone.

The silver dry-brush is why any of it reads from the doorway. Metal catches on every raised edge while the recesses stay black, so the relief has contrast instead of collapsing into one dark lump the way a flat coat of paint would. Look closely and you will find the print lines running through the rock, because it was printed and we would rather you knew.

Choose your half

• Head. The end of the shelf people notice first. Works alone.
• Tail. The quieter half, and the better one if the shelf is against a wall and only one end is on show.
• Head and tail. The pair, and the only version that turns the books between them into part of the animal. If you are going to own one of these, own both.

Where it belongs

A fantasy shelf. A Dungeons and Dragons collection with nowhere left to put anything. A study that has earned one unreasonable object. It is the least subtle thing we make and it has no intention of apologising for that.

Looking after it

Out of direct sun, because PLA softens around 60 degrees. Dust with a soft dry brush rather than a cloth, which catches on the teeth and the tail spines. Lift it by the panel, never by the horns or the tip of the tail.

NEIGHBOUR 001

First one in the street. Printed and finished by hand in Australia. The number belongs to this design alone, and is retired rather than reused when we stop making it.