The Book on the Bookshelf (review)

Abstract

From a contemporary perspective, it is difficult to imagine books being stored any way other than vertically on shelves, with their spines facing out. In The Book on the Bookshelf, Henry Petroski points to the error in this assumption by studying books and shelves through every period of history, from ancient scrolls housed in containers that look like hat boxes, to medieval book chests, to the engineering of [End Page 390] book stacks in modern libraries. These changes are neither arbitrary nor without consequence; each phase in the evolution of books and shelves has influenced the arrangement and organization of books, the architecture of libraries, and the modes of study and scholarship that are undertaken. The history of the book and the bookshelf, Petroski tells us, "are not arcane subjects . . . they are among the basic data of civilization that provide a means to a better understanding of the evolving technology of today and to extrapolating it into the future" (13). Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and history, is, perhaps, uniquely qualified to examine the histories of the book and the bookshelf as objects and as technologies. The Book on the Bookshelf is an exploration into the "evolution of an artifact, a tool for explaining how technology is embedded in and shapes our culture" (9). This book and the histories it studies reveal much about human culture's dynamic relationship to scholarship, knowledge, text, and libraries.