Kraken Book Nook, Escaping Octopus

NEIGHBOUR 002 arrived the way they do. Overnight, from below, and without a sound.

It is coming out of the box, not sitting in it

The body fills a plain black rectangle and the arms have already left it: two over the top, two down the sides, two curling out along the shelf toward whatever is next to it. The box is the last thing holding it in and it is clearly losing.

It stands in the gap between books, the width of a hardback, and because the arms break the outline in four directions it never reads as an object on a shelf. It reads as something halfway out of somewhere.

Cream against black, and that is the whole trick

The octopus is printed in soft cream and the box is flat black, so every arm is drawn against its own background instead of disappearing into the bookcase behind it. It is the same reason a specimen in a museum case sits on dark cloth.

Every sucker, one at a time

Not a texture stamped onto a cylinder. Each arm tapers properly from base to tip, and each sucker sits in its own raised ring, right down to the small ones at the end of the curl. The undersides are finished as carefully as the tops, because on a shelf the undersides are the part at eye level.

Where it belongs

Nautical, gothic, cosmic horror, or a shelf where the books happen to be about the sea. It suits a room that has already decided not to be tasteful, and it is the one guests pull off the shelf without asking.

Looking after it

Lift it by the body rather than by an arm. Keep it out of direct sun, because PLA softens around 60 degrees, and dust it with a soft dry brush rather than a cloth, which snags on the suckers.

NEIGHBOUR 002

Printed and finished by hand in Australia, numbered once, and retired when the run ends.

It stands between the books

The box is about the width of a hardback and slots into a row rather than sitting in front of it. It is not a bookend and will not hold a row up. It is a scene that lives among them, with two arms over the edge into your shelf.

How it is made

Modelled from scratch, printed here on our own machines, then cleaned up, finished and packed by hand. Nothing is outsourced and nothing is cast, so every piece carries faint layer lines and no two come out quite identical. We could sand those out. We would rather you could see it was made than see it was manufactured.

PLA, which is a corn-starch derived plastic. It is rigid, it holds fine detail better than almost anything else at this price, and it has one weakness worth knowing: it softens at around 60 degrees. A sunny windowsill in February is the one place it should never live.

Ordering one now

Everything here is made to order. Nothing sits in a box waiting, which is why you are not paying for a warehouse. Order it and yours goes into the next batch, usually within a fortnight, and you are emailed when it goes on the bed and again when it ships.

Change your mind before it is printed and we refund it in full without asking why. After that you still have every right you have under Australian Consumer Law, which we cannot exclude and would not want to.