Coolest. Bookstand. Ever.

I've been toying with the idea of getting a bookstand to use in my office. When studying from several books, I usually have to flip them over and pile them on top of one another while I look at another book. With paperbacks this can get especially tricky. Then I saw a picture of N.T. Wright with a wooden bookstand for his BDAG (the massive go-to Greek lexicon) and thought, "That's what I need." 

A quick Google search yielded surprisingly exciting results. I found another picture of N.T. Wright using a strange bookstand with four stands on the sides and one on top, all of which had what appeared to be a swivel base. AWESOME! You can have five books open at once and all you have to do is swing them around!

THEN I found that this particular bookstand is modeled after one found in Monticello, possibly created by Thomas Jefferson himself! Oh, the goosebumps travel down the nerd's arms! 

The nerd was brought down to earth, however, when the price tag on this puppy in the Monticello Catalog was $613. That's just a few dollars out of my price range, to say the least.

But there is still hope. I found a YouTube video of a guy named David Colarusso who built one of these himself and was generous enough to provide a free PDF of the blueprints to anyone interested! It seems quite complicated and I am anything but a carpenter, but it seems like a worthwhile challenge. It took him about 30 hours to build his, but he only had a picture. He subsequently created the blueprint for the D.I.Y. Jeffersonian Bookstand.

Anyway, this may be a fun project for me this summer. I'll have to look into it some more (my desk may not even be big enough for such a stand), but I'm thinking this would be pretty cool to have.