If you are wondering what to get your Ricardian friend or relative as a birthday present, you might like to consider the ‘Richard III Armchair’ (see here).  It was designed in 1985 by Phillippe Starck.  I’m not sure whether the 500th anniversary of Richard’s death at the Battle of Bosworth is coincidental.  If it was, it would be interesting to know why Phillippe Starck chose to commemorate Richard III.  The chair is supposed to be a “personification of the Shakespeare character.  The chair represents the two sides of the character in terms of being both traditional and modern, concave and convex and have both strength and delicacy.”  It’s not quite clear in which way the designer considered Shakespeare’s Richard (or the real one for that matter) as ‘both traditional and modern”.

The chair certainly looks interesting and strangely attractive, but somehow it does not look like the right kind of chair to curl up in and read a good book.

Tags: Richard III, Shakespeare