This late-night lamp takes your laziness and turns it into a virtue. When you are propped up in bed reading and you can no longer keep your eyes open, let alone fumble for a light switch, just drop your book on top of the bedside light. The wedge-shape of the Reading Lamp will let your book hang over it, keeping your place, and an infrared switch detects the book and kills the power. Too hot? Scared the book might hit Fahrenheit 451? The compact fluorescent inside keeps things cool-ish and the polycarbonate shade is tough enough to last.

The Reading Lamp is part of a group project by designers Alban Le Henry, Olivier Pigasse, Vincent Vandenbrouck and Jun Yasumoto, and looks to us very much like the lights inside the railroad trains of childhood, when the windows had curtains, the seats had ashtrays and the conductors called you sir. Well, they called my father sir. I was always to busy throwing up my ice-cream lunch from the window (an opening window, at least).

This is a concept which should be snapped up right now. Muji and Ikea, I’m looking at you.

Product page [Jun Yasumoto via Core77]