The Book on the Bookshelf

by Henry Petroski Narrated by John Lescault

Overview

From the author of the highly praised The Pencil and The Evolution of Useful Things comes another captivating history of the seemingly mundane: the book and its storage.

Most of us take for granted that our books are vertical on our shelves with the spines facing out, but Henry Petroski, inveterately curious engineer, didn't. As a result, readers are guided along the astonishing evolution from papyrus scrolls boxed at Alexandria to upright books shelved at the Library of Congress.

Petroski takes us into the pre-Gutenberg world, when books were so scarce they were chained to lecterns for security. He explains how the printing press not only changed the way books were made and shelved but also increased their availability and transformed book readers into book owners and collectors.

In delightful digressions, Petroski lets Seneca have his say on “the evils of book collecting;” examines the famed collection of Samuel Pepys and his only three thousand titles-old discarded to make room for new; and discusses bookselling, book buying, and book collecting through the centuries.

This is the ultimate book on the book: how it came to be and how we have come to keep it.

Editorial Reviews

Alberto Manguel

For anyone interested in the craft of reading, Petroski's most recent exploration is a compulsive necessity...The charm lies not in the rigorous chronology but in the marginalia...
— NY Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

That bookshelves might harbor secret and enchanting lives is a thrilling prospect for any serious reader. What laws of human nature govern our sturdy cases of books? What damning quirks of character glare from a few casually stowed volumes? In this disappointing study, however, Petroski's effort to reveal the "evolution of the bookshelf as we know it" yields few rewards. Pondering the physics of the bookend and the genealogy of the library carrel, this Duke University scholar observes the bookshelf as a piece of the infrastructure undergirding our civilization. We learn that medieval books were chained to their shelves to prevent theft, and that beverage stains have plagued bibliophiles almost since the dawn of the printed word. Admirers of Petroski's earlier works (The Evolution of Useful Things, Remaking the World, etc.) will not be surprised by his exquisite research, or by the gusto with which he plunges into the dustiest of library bins. But the bookshelf proves a more oblique topic than bridges or even pencils, two of Petroski's other interests. The practical construction principles of bookshelves make for rather dull reading, and conjecture about lectern usage in the Middle Ages wears thin. This book is most successful when delving into the gritty aspects of engineering, whether it be the cantilevered forces of library book stacks or the architecture of the British Museum Reading Room. After lingering among such fusty stacks, readers will welcome the whimsical appendix, which proposes arranging one's books alphabetically by the author's first name, or even by the first word of the antepenultimate sentence. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

If "God is in the details" then those seeking God should read Petroski's books (including The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance and The Evolution of Useful Things). In all of his books, Petroski reveals the technological issues and surprising histories of everyday things. Here he details the evolution of the bookshelf. Most people, librarians included, think of bookshelves, if they think of them at all, as an inevitable response to the development of books. Petroski starts by questioning why books are shelved vertically on horizontal shelves with their spines out and follows with the story of how the storage and shelving of books as well as the design and construction of libraries has developed: from the scrolls and codexes of ancient times to medieval monastic libraries (where books were chained to desks) to the development of modern bookstacks, the evolution of compact shelves, and a consideration of the future of the book. Petroski includes delightful glimpses of noteworthy book collectors of the past and how they organized their books. Well written and richly illustrated, this book is not just for bibliophiles. Highly recommended.--Paul A. D'Alessandro, Portland P.L., ME Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

Technology popularizer Petroski (civil engineering and history, Duke U.) traces how books have been stored and displayed during the course of their evolution from scroll to codex to modern volume. He describes how before Gutenberg and printing, books were so rare and valuable they were chained to lecterns for security, and how books were first shelved with their spines in rather than out. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Martin Gardner

No writer ever tried harder than Chesterton to convey to his readers a sense of wonder and mystery about common, everyday objects. The Book on the Shelf is a facinating history of two related common objects, impeccably documented and beautifully illustrated. It is impossible to put this book down without seeing bookshelves as the culminationof a long, colorful, little-noticed history.
— Civilization

John Derbyshire

The Book on the Bookshelf is a pleasure to read, stocked with a wealth of fascinating, sometimes astonishing, detail yet never rambling or departing for long from its set course. It is an excellent companion for—could be shelved next to!𓴼Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading.

The New Criterion

Merle Rubin

The charm of this book lies in the way it helps us take a fresh look at an old, long-familiar object, seeing it, as its various inventors and innovators did, for the first time. Almost no detail however small, is unexamined.
— The Christian Science Monitor

Kirkus Reviews

Petroski does for the bookcase what he did for The Pencil (1990) and for bridges in Engineer of Dreams (1995): offers an elaborately detailed history of a common item as an artifact.

From the Publisher

"For anyone interested in the craft of reading, [this book] is a compulsive necessity." —The New York Times Book Review

"A fascinating history of two related common objects, impeccably documented and beautifully illustrated." —Civilization

"After reading this book, you will not look at a book or a bookshelf in the same way." —Seattle Times

"If 'God is in the details,' then those seeking God should read Petroski's books." —Library Journal

Seattle Times

After reading this book, you will not look at a book or a bookshelf in the same way.”

Civilization

A fascinating history of two related common objects, impeccably documented.”

New York Times Book Review

For anyone interested in the craft of reading, [this book] is a compulsive necessity.”

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175875899
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	10/17/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

My reading chair faces my bookshelves, and I see them every time I look up from the page. When I say that I see them, I speak metaphorically, of course, for how often do we really see what we look at day in and day out? In the case of my bookshelves, in fact, I tend to see the books and not the shelves. If I think consciously about it and refocus my eyes -- the way I must do when viewing optical illusions, to see the stairs go up instead of down or the cube recede in perspective to the right rather than to the left -- I can see the shelves, but usually only their edges and maybe the bottoms of the upper shelves, and seldom the shelves complete and the shelves alone. Even when the bookshelves are bare, I tend to see not the shelves themselves but the absence of books, for the shelves are defined by their purpose.

If the truth be told, neither do I see the books without the shelves. The bottoms of the books rest squarely on the shelves, and the rows of books are aligned against gravity. The tops of these same books present a ragged line, of course, but even this is defined by the shelf on which they rest, and is emphasized by the straight edge of the shelf above. Books and bookshelves are a technological system, each component of which influences how we view the other. Since we interact with books and bookshelves, we too become part of the system. This alters our view of it and its components and influences our very interaction with it. Such is the nature of technology and its artifacts.

An attempt to gain perspective on the bookshelf is not a simple matter. The bookshelves in my study go from floor to ceiling and nearly cover one of its walls, but because my study is notgrand, I cannot easily distance myself from the wall of shelves. Even when I first moved into this study, when it and the bookshelves were bare, I could not stand back far enough to view the shelves entire. No matter where I stand before this wall of shelves, I see the bottoms of some and the tops of others, the left side of some of the vertical supports and the right side of others. I never see all of a single shelf at a single time. I can, of course, take it for granted that all the shelves are identical and so infer that when I see the bottom of one shelf I see the bottom of all shelves, but there is something not wholly satisfying about such philosophizing, common as it is.

While reading in my chair late one evening I perceived, for whatever reason, the bookshelf beneath a row of books in a new light. I saw it as a piece of infrastructure, taken for granted if not neglected, like a bridge beneath a line of cars, and I wanted to know more about the nature and origins of this ubiquitous thing. But where to begin? Was it meaningful to ask why the bookshelf is horizontal and why books are placed vertically upon it? Or are these facts so obvious as to need no explanation? Going further, was there anything to be gained by asking why we shelve our books with their spines facing outward, or is this simply the only logical way to shelve them? Don't books go on bookshelves, as nuts go on bolts, only one way?

As it turns out, the story of the bookshelf is rooted in the story of the book, and vice versa. It may be strictly true that books can exist without bookshelves, and we can imagine the Library of Congress or even the local public library with books contained in boxes, stacked on the floor, or stored in piles like firewood or coal. The bookshelf, however, can hardly be imagined without the existence of books. That is not to say that without books we would not have shelves, but they would certainly not be bookshelves. The bookshelf, like the book, has become an integral part of civilization as we know it, its presence in a home practically defining what it means to be civilized, educated, and refined. Indeed, the presence of bookshelves greatly influences our behavior.

Authors often have their pictures taken in front of bookshelves, but why? Certainly they have not written all the books before which they stand. Perhaps they want to show us how many books they have read in order to write theirs, and that we will not have to read if we delve into their comprehensive essay or historical novel, with its extensive notes or wide-ranging bibliography, explicit or implicit. Since the book on which their photo appears is seldom, if ever, on the bookshelf behind them, perhaps these authors are sending the subliminal message that we should go to the bookstore and buy their book to complete the shelf.

But can a bookshelf ever be complete? There are well over fifty thousand books published every year in America alone. Can anyone read that many books even in a lifetime? The math is not hard to do. If we read roughly a book a day, we can read about one thousand books every three years. Assuming that we start when we are four years old and live to the ripe old age of ninety-four, we could then read about thirty thousand books in a lifetime. What would it take to shelve that many books? Assuming each book requires on average an inch of shelf length, we would need about 2,500 feet of shelving. It would take a house with six or seven large rooms fitted with bookshelves on every wall to hold that many books, which would make it not a home but a bookstore -- or a small town's public library.

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