By Ian Scott Horst
Ian is the admin of the Wooden Asia Facebook page, for fans of Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese themed Book Nooks and DIY. He wants you to know his stash is not running low!
While it’s a little ironic that Book Nooks might actually displace books on our shelves, they often reflect our deep love of the printed word, and of everything an accumulation of books suggests. Libraries and bookshops are kind of magic portals to other worlds, and popular culture often expands on that deep understanding by making a connection between that analogical magic and the mysterious worlds of spells, potions and time travel.
“Sea of Time and Space Bookstore” is a Book-Nook-like building kit, an officially licensed tie-in to the Chinese time-travel romantic series and film “Shining for One Thing.” I haven’t actually seen this light sci-fi fantasy Shining for One Thing, but like most of us Book Nookers I am a sucker for a tie-in product since they usually bring a dose of extra creativity to the wooden DIY world as well as bring our favorite cultural experiences together. I read up on Shining for One Thing, and it’s an odd story for a time travel tale since the protagonist merely moves from young adulthood back to high school age, but apparently it’s a story of young romantic regret healed by a trip through the years. The action centers around a magic bookshop where the mysterious and kind owner facilitates the magical reunion: in reading about it I couldn’t help recall the shop in “1984” and its role in the relationships of the characters. Given the story, I was a little surprised not to see character figures in this kit, but what I did find was an extraordinary build of a massive decaying bookstore in the Chinese town of Xiamen.
The movie was filmed on location in Xiamen, at an old bookshop that became a local tourist attraction and then seems to have become a closed-up near ruin. The building is not anything like a traditional pavilion, it’s a gritty 20th-century urban structure with two patios and a lovely curved wall.
The Build
Produced by innovative Chinese manufacturer Muenshuo, known for beautifully artistic Nooks directed at the Chinese domestic market, it comes in an undersize box, with logos clearly showing it’s officially licensed from Beijing Cool Whale Film & TV Entertainment. But it is not an undersized kit; I don’t see an official piece count anywhere in the four Chinese-language-only broadsheet pages of black and white instructions, but this will take you several sittings, and I wouldn’t recommend it for a beginning builder. The finished model is about 7.5 inches in all dimensions, which makes it about the height of a Japanese mini-house kit, but its much larger footprint gives it a more imposing presence. The Chinese signage and the architecture clearly mark this as not just another Victorian fantasy bookstore kit.
It comes with over ten well labelled, pleasantly laminated MDF boards, a 2AAA battery box, and a bunch of loose LED wires. Although it’s a bookstore, mercifully the interior of the shop which is full of shelves uses 2D flat composites for the books, and only the ones on the lower patio are the 3D-kind of sticker-and-wood ones, in two sizes. There’s a touch panel for the 5 lights, with two LEDs illuminating the outside patios, and three illuminating the two inside storeys. Changing the batteries will be a bit of a fiddly exercise reaching up into the build from the bottom.
The several accordion cut curved wall pieces fit safely without threat of breakage. I personally love good 2D flat vegetation, so I actually enjoy the potted plants on the patio, but there would be plenty of customization room to replace those with 3D.
The most Book Nook part of this building kit is the fact that the entire interior of the building is a fully detailed bookshop with rows and rows of bookshelves, tables and chairs, and a wooden stairway, that once the building is closed up, you can only see by peering into the lit interior via windows with movable shutters. The graphics vividly suggest a decaying industrial setting, and I colored a lot of the edges to give it a bit more realism.
The electrical kit is one of the challenges here. Placed very early in the build, the wires in the kit must be spliced to the battery box before it is built around. It’s good the lights are loose, because three of them must be fed through wooden pieces that will eventually become part of sort of ceiling-hanging box lanterns on the interior. The Chinese instructions were not super clear on which three; fortunately I guessed right and left the shortest wire hanging free. Once the wires are safely spliced together, the path for the lights is logical, unobtrusive and well engineered; you just have to have faith in the process that the instructions will make sense eventually, and they do, so the building begins to rise up around the wiring. The kit uses a fair amount of glue, though most of the tenon and mortise fit was perfect.
“Shining for One Thing” does not get good reviews on the English-language internet,so I’m not sure I’m in a rush to see it. But Muenshuo continues to impress me with the quality of their design and engineering. This was a fun, extended build, with a really impressive result, and I’m eager to see what else this manufacturer comes up with.
I purchased mine on AliExpress (“Casa Miniature Building”), one of the best sources for Chinese-audience kits. If you love building magic libraries and bookshops but aren’t sure you want another Harry Potter rethread, here’s the Chinese Sci-Fi-inspired kit you might really enjoy.
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