Henry Petroski - The Book on the Bookshelf

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.

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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 booksHistory. 2. Shelving for booksEuropeHistory. 3. BookbindingHistory. 4. BookbindingEuropeHistory. 5. BooksStorageHistory. 6. BooksEuropeStorageHistory. I. Title.

Z685.P48 1999

022.409dc21 99-14336

v3.1

To Karen and Jason,
whose bookshelves are full

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 inwhere 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 ones 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, Dukes main library, and for the helpfulness of all its staff. My main point of contact with the Duke libraries is the Aleksandar S. Vesi 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 librarys 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 Universitys Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and Sterling Memorial Library; the University of Iowas rare-book library and its distinguished collection in the history of hydraulics; and the Smithsonian Institutions 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 librarys 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

M y 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 eyesthe 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 leftI 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 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.