The Book on the Bookshelf Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  Copyright © 1999 by Henry Petroski

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.randomhouse.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Petroski, Henry.

  The book on the bookshelf / by Henry Petroski. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77328-9

  1. Shelving for books—History. 2. Shelving for books—Europe—History. 3. Bookbinding—History. 4. Bookbinding—Europe—History. 5. Books—Storage—History. 6. Books—Europe—Storage—History. I. Title.

  Z685.P48 1999

  022′.4′09—dc21 99-14336

  v3.1

  To Karen and Jason,

  whose bookshelves are full

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  1. Books on Bookshelves

  2. From Scrolls to Codices

  3. Chests, Cloisters, and Carrels

  4. Chained to the Desk

  5. The Press of Books

  6. Studying Studies

  7. Up Against the Wall

  8. Books and Bookshops

  9. Bookstack Engineering

  10. Shelves That Move

  11. The Care of Books

  Appendix: Order, Order

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustrations

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Preface

  One evening, while reading in my study, I looked up from my book and saw my bookshelves in a new and different light. Instead of being just places on which to store books, the shelves themselves intrigued me as artifacts in their own right, and I wondered how they came to be as they are. Question led to question, and I began to look for answers in—where else?—books. Books led me to libraries, where I naturally encountered more bookshelves. I have found that, as simple as the bookshelf might appear to be as an object of construction and utility, the story of its development, which is intertwined with that of the book itself, is curious, mysterious, and fascinating.

  The books that have helped me understand and tell the story of the bookshelf are acknowledged in this one’s bibliography. Libraries, librarians, and library staff members who helped me assemble the bibliography should be acknowledged here. As I have found time after time, the libraries of Duke University are an indispensable resource for me, not only for their own wonderful collections but also for the access that they provide through interlibrary loan to the rest of the library world. I am grateful for the continuing carrel assignment I have enjoyed in Perkins, Duke’s main library, and for the helpfulness of all its staff. My main point of contact with the Duke libraries is the Aleksandar S. Vesić Engineering Library, and its staff, Dianne Himler, Tara Bowens, and librarian Linda Martinez. Their patience with what must seem my endless and capricious requests has my heartfelt appreciation. I am also grateful to Eric Smith, a tireless reference librarian in Perkins, and to the university librarian, David Ferriero, who provided me with letters of introduction to British libraries and who referred me to Janet Chase of the Library of Congress. It was she who not only arranged for me a tour of that library’s historic Stacks, which are closed even to most library staff, but also thoughtfully arranged for a parking space right in front of the Jefferson Building. Joseph Puccio, public service officer at the Library of Congress, provided a most thorough and informative tour of the stacks that revolutionized library storage.

  I am also grateful to the many other librarians and library staff for the time and freedom they gave me to explore their bookstacks and the books in their collections. Among the visits most helpful to my arcane purposes were those to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and Sterling Memorial Library; the University of Iowa’s rare-book library and its distinguished collection in the history of hydraulics; and the Smithsonian Institution’s Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, where Leslie Overstreet, reference librarian in the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, was especially helpful in showing me around the Dibner collection. I am also grateful to Alison Sproston, sub-librarian in Trinity College, Cambridge University, for guiding my visit to the Wren Library; to Richard Luckett and Aude Fitzsimons, librarian and assistant librarian in Magdalene College, Cambridge, for enabling me to see the Pepys Library on short notice; and to Dan Lewis and Alan Jutzi of The Huntington for their guided tour of that library’s rare book stacks and vault.

  Ashbel Green, my editor, Asya Muchnick, his assistant, Melvin Rosenthal, the production editor, Robert Olsson, the designer, and everyone else who participated in the production of this book from my manuscript, have once again demonstrated the excellence of Alfred A. Knopf, for which I am enormously grateful.

  My children, Karen and Stephen, no longer living at home, have participated less directly in this book than they have in some previous ones, but the questions I expected they might ask and the observations I thought they might make have informed this book no less than my others. My wife, Catherine, has once again provided a reality check on my ideas and a fair first reading of the manuscript.

  H.P.

  Durham, North Carolina,

  and Arrowsic, Maine

  CHAPTER ONE

  Books on Bookshelves

  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 not grand, 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 sh
elves 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.

  But if we walked into such a house, would we see books or bookshelves? Which in fact do we see when we walk into a library? In virtually all cases, the books are the focus of our attention. Like the steps beneath a group of people being photographed, the shelves go largely unseen; they are there but not there. They are the infrastructure. Yet the bookshelf is also conspicuous in its absence. When we enter a living room without books or bookshelves, we wonder if the people in the house do nothing but watch television.

  Ironically, the bookshelf is a familiar prop on television, being frequently part of the deep background for interviews on shows ranging from Today to Nightline. Congressmen and senators hold news conferences carried on C-SPAN before a bookcase that is no wider than the camera’s frame. (Are the books in it real?) Whenever Newt Gingrich wore his bookshelf necktie on the set, he was faced and backed by books. Lawyers and professors are often interviewed in front of shelves of books, the producer apparently wanting to associate the experts with the authority of the library behind them.

  A propped-up prop, the bookshelf plays a supporting role to the book. It is not only the backdrop but the stage itself upon which books line up for applause. And yet, important as its role has been in the history of civilization, the bookshelf seldom even gets mentioned in the program; it is treated as a supernumerary, taken for granted, and ignored. There is much anecdotal evidence that this is the case.

  During a cocktail party, the wife of a colleague retreated to my study to nurse her newborn baby. When she emerged some time later with the sleeping child, she said she hoped I didn’t mind that she had browsed through my bookshelves, but she was interested to find several books that she had fond memories of reading. It is, of course, unremarkable that she had nary a word to say about the shelves on which the books reside. But when another guest visited my study on a different occasion, his focus on the books to the exclusion of the shelves was notable.

  On a pleasant spring afternoon, this guest browsed in my study while I looked for something to give him to read on the plane. His browsing soon became perusing, and he looked at the books on my bookshelves with an intensity of purpose that was not unfamiliar. It is a spectator sport to look at someone else’s books, if not an act of voyeurism or armchair psychology. My guest seemed hardly to overlook a title on the shelves, and he remarked to me that he always found it interesting to see what people owned and read. Naturally, he would be interested: my guest was a psychologist, a specialist in cognitive science who has served as a consultant on computer-user interfaces, and who now advised a major office-equipment manufacturer about what products to develop and what features to design into them. He had written with insight on the design of everyday things, paying special attention to their use. As a reader of his books, I did not think he would miss a thing, no matter what he was looking at.

  Earlier in the day I had shown him around town. We had stopped at a new public policy studies building which has been lauded for the attention its architect paid to how the structure and its space would be used. As soon as we entered, we could see that this was not a conventional building. Numerous offices and conference rooms open onto balcony-like hallways that overlook two sides of a common space which is only loosely bordered on its other two sides by tiers of open lounge areas, which also overlook and help define the atrium. It does not appear that a person can move from one part of the building to another without walking along a hall or stairway that is open to the common space, where chance encounters among those in the building are likely to be frequent, as no doubt planned. The arrangement reminded me of the National Humanities Center, where people enter and leave through the commons, which also serves as the dining area where visiting scholars writing books on everything from pencils to phenomenology gather to converse. My guest was immediately struck by the thoughtful design of the new building, noting subtle details that go unnoticed by most of us, like lighting fixtures over bulletin boards and the hardware on the doors, which he has written about with special insight and passion. Having begun to think about this book, I was hoping to see the bookshelves in the building’s offices, but no offices were open on the Saturday afternoon that we visited.

  Back in my study, we talked not about things or even about books as objects but about the ideas they contain and how different categories of books were grouped on my bookshelves. My guest found and commented on some familiar titles that he no doubt expected, like Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine and many books about bridges, but he expressed surprise at finding some others there. I explained that many of those having to do with the design of computer software had been sent or given to me by readers of my own books on the design of bridges and other useful things. Since I have argued that design is design, regardless of the object being designed, the collection of books represents to me a unity of theme, if not a downright obsession with a few ideas, but I admitted difficulty in deciding exactly where to shelve a given book that touches on more than one aspect of the theme. My guest surely formed an opinion about what I read and how I work in my study, but the conversation turned to computers and the features I should look for in a laptop, s
ince I told him I was in the market for one.

  If my guest formed an opinion about me through the books on my bookshelves, this confirmed one of my current hypotheses: that for all the attention even the most observant of us pays to useful things, we all but ignore the infrastructure upon which they rest. My guest made no comment about the bookshelves, even after I tried to steer the conversation in that direction. Even the fact that the topmost of the floor-to-ceiling shelves were out of his reach did not elicit a comment from him, this critic of everything from the design of telephone systems to the location of electric-light switches. “The dust and silence of the upper shelf,” about which Lord Macaulay wrote, remained undisturbed in our conversation as well. Once in place and with books upon it, the bookshelf has no moving parts and no obvious function except to stay where it is and support a line of books. It is like a common bridge on a small country road, there but not there to all who use it every day. Yet let the bridge be washed out in a flood, and suddenly it becomes the most important topic of discussion in the county. So it is with technology generally: it is most present in its absence.

  When I began working on this book, I saw bookshelves where I once saw books, but not everyone shared my perspective. At a dinner party one evening, in the home of a historian who built his own wall of bookcases sized just right to hold the many paperbacks that historians are wont to have, I commented on the bookshelves I had all but ignored on previous visits. The conversation eventually turned from the pride of workmanship in making such things to the more general topic of books and their arrangement on the shelves. Since I was full of thoughts of how books were shelved in medieval times and the evolution of the bookshelf as we know it, I tried to steer the after-dinner talk back to bookshelves. I was interested to learn that their origins are not widely known even among historians, especially those whose period is not the Middle Ages. Talking to a retired English professor some months later, I found again that the physical nature of medieval books and the fact that they were chained to the bookshelf is not common knowledge among students of books whose specialties lie in later centuries.