November 17, 2025
Description
Everyone's designing and printing bookends, so here's my take on one. I didn't know we were all such avid readers…
The stand part of the bookend is meant to go under the nearest books so it stays in place, and for the bookend to look like it's just another book on the end of the row.
I put in a a compartment in the bottom of the book where I planned on putting in weights so it would be more solid. But weights are not needed as once you put a heavy enough book on the stand part, the bookend is going nowhere. But I thought the compartment was a neat place to store (or hide) some small valuables so I kept it as part of the design.
I printed the model with fuzzy skin outer walls for the book part to give it an old-leather-journal look.
There are three ways you can print this. There's a 3MF file for the left-hand and right-hand side of each way (The 3MF files are for Bambu Studio but you can still use them to get all the objects and parts separated and in place if you use a different slicer).
The bookend is split into parts and separated into a few plates by colour. You will need to glue the spine lines and pages on afterwards. This can be printed on a 3D printer that doesn't have multicolour capabilities (i.e. AMS or MMU) but still get different colours in the end model. This is how I will personally be printing this if I make this again in the future as it prints a lot quicker than the multicolour version and looks as good (if not better). Attaching the parts only takes 5 mins and it doesn't waste filament with all the colour changes that are needed for some multicolour printers.
One plate, no glue required. If you have a printer capable of multicolour printing.
The fastest way to print this. Everything is intended to be the same colour. One plate and you can choose not to use fuzzy skin to reduce print time slightly.
Here are the print settings I used and would recommend:
Book object:
Pages object:
Spine lines objects (if printing as separate objects):
Since fuzzy skin is used and the profile of the model going up is mostly the same, this would be a good model to try printing with a larger nozzle (0.6 or 0.8) and larger layer height as the layers should not be easily visible even with thicker layers.
The parts assembly STL and STP are what should be used for the “split into parts” version. The parts are slightly smaller in these files so they fit into the bookend easily.
Other details:
Supports are required because of the compartment, but they come off very easily. If you take a pair of pliers and dig it into the supports underneath and pull, the supports should just come off in one piece:
License:
Creative Commons — Attribution — Noncommercial — Share Alike