Synopsis
The invention of the printing press not only led to the widespread availability of books, but also required the invention of a new piece of furniture: the bookshelf. This historical survey examines the various ways bookshelves have been designed and the way their designs reveal cultural attitudes toward the value, purpose, and use of books.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2000-09-01 | | Series: | Vintage |
| Size | | Height: | 8.0 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 9.6 oz |
Publisher's Note
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. Unimpeachably researched, enviably written, and charmed with anecdotes from Seneca to Samuel Pepys to a nineteenth-century bibliophile who had to climb over his books to get into bed, The Book on the Bookshelf is indispensable for anyone who loves books.
Industry Reviews
"...Petroski manages to support his personal feelings about book storage with telling historical anecdotes--and to offset his engineer's fascination with load, sag, lighting and shelf construction with quite lyrical passages from that obsessive biblio-visionary, Melvil Dewey (he of the Decimal System)....THE BOOK ON THE BOOKSHELF can be relished even by those who don't aspire to a degree in librarianship."
Book World - Michael Dirda (09/12/1999)
"Henry Petroski, who has an eye for the common things that surround us and that we hardly notice...has decided to track the birth, evolution, triumphs and failures not of the book but of the space that keeps it....For anyone interested in the craft of reading, Petroski's most recent exploration is a compulsive necessity."
Manguel
"Petroski has earned a reputation as the champion of unsung objects and their designers....[THE BOOK ON THE BOOKSHELF] extends this approach to that most seemingly inevitable of items, the bookshelf. His account of the evolution of the furniture used to store books and support them provides an intriguingly oblique look at the history of the book, by making us acutely conscious of the sheer physicality of reading."
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review - Michael Rosenthal (12/26/1999)
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