Vuitton trunks from back then were EXTREMELY well made. Practically bullet-proof when closed – the modern equivalent of a Pelican case. Better made than all of the following dozen or so vintage steamer trunks I’ve owned. I even moved it across country as checked baggage (can you imagine doing that now?) when I was in college because I needed some way of transporting it. Oh the forms they made me sign! 

So while Vuitton may now be more about the LV and class and wealth and status, when they were used for gallivanting around the world by wealthy people they were at least ALSO a very robust bit of kit. 

Louis Vuitton is somehow not inappropriate

They didn’t make anything but luggage for their first half-century, I believe.  But then, Abercrombie & Fitch were safari outfitters.

http://www.designer-case.com/servlet/the-1305/Designer-dsh-case.com,-Nexus-7-case,/Detail

I realise that taste is subjective but what is it you find so “stupid” about the classic LV Monogram Canvas design? I think it is rather tasteful.

You have educated me and i feel like learning more.

I have seen specimens with nearly two hundred slim bound tomes (Bell’s British Poets were popular for the purpose, as well as various classical texts) sometimes in two cases. Often these cases themselves are in book form, leather-bound over wooden boards, (with marbled paper linings much like a book’s end-papers, in the instance of one example I recently handled).

Surviving examples are quite rare, and often tend to be worn–they saw hard use. Sometimes the bindings (books and case) were very elaborate indeed). Louis Vuitton is somehow not inappropriate (at least old Vuitton) and I am not at all surprised to learn that the firm custom-made such libraries for real in the dim and distant past (the firm dates, I believe, from the 1850s). I’m not a hundred percent certain this example was built for the purpose, but could well be, although–thank heavens–it does not have its quota of LV monogrammed books.