This to me is a marmite product – you either love the Isokon Penguin Donkey or find it just a little bit too weird, all the while acknowledging it is a modern classic and that interesting ways to store and display books are hard to find. Parsing its name explains it all: Isokon was a  design and construction company building modernist housing in London in the 1930s. Penguin Books, founded by Allen Lane in 1935, was an immediate success, its wide range of affordable paperbacks finding a ready market. Lane commissioned designer Egon Riss at Isokon to make a modern bookshelf, a piece of furniture to hold the uniformly pocket-size paperbacks. By the time the birch bentwood design was ready, it was 1939, the second World War was about to start and the public appetite for new furniture and the availability of the material to make it was gone.  The 100 original pieces produced by Isokon are now the most collectible. And the Donkey in the title makes sense when you see it is made up of four legs and two paniers to take the load (of books) on either side. The centre holds magazines or newspapers, and the Donkey was designed to stand at the side of a sofa or easy chair. Such is the enduring power of the concept that it has been revived twice, with new versions created: in 1963 the influential British designer Earnest Race designed a version – more angular, with a more practical flat top, and then in 2003 the third version of the Donkey, still usable as a side table but with softer edges, was designed by London-based designer Shin and Tomoko Azumi. All three versions are still in production.