Henry Petroski: The Book on the Bookshelf

By JOHN CONNOR

Henry Petroski is a professor at Duke University. If his lectures are anything like his writing style and I was one of his students I would be asleep within 10 minutes.

He has all the qualities necessary for this soporific effect: an excellent academic mind and an exhaustive knowledge of and fascination with a topic that most people would not give a second thought to.

He has already written the definitive work on the pencil and now gives us what will certainly be the definitive work on the bookshelf. The bookshelf? What is there to write about such a mundane piece of furniture?

Well, Petroski has written 290 pages about it. Like its intimate but more famous companion, the book, the bookshelf did not suddenly appear on the scene fully formed.

It evolved over hundreds of years. The greatest library of antiquity, at Alexandria, had no bookshelves; it had no books. Its thousands of scrolls were stored away on shelves much as bolts of cloth are stored in fabric shops today.

Even when the book, recognisable as such, appeared in the Middle Ages, a bookshelf was not the logical place to store it. There were so few books and they were so rare and irreplaceable that they were stored in locked chests called armaria.

When books were allowed out of their armaria they were usually kept, face up, on shelves that looked more like lecterns, and were held there by chains and locks.

The bookshelf proper had to wait for the invention of the printing press and the production of more and cheaper books before it made its appearance.

Today there are more than 50,000 books published each year in the United States alone and there are thousands and thousands of bookshelves on which to store them. They are in their heyday but it might not last. When complete editions of an encyclopedia can be stored on CD-ROM, what need is there for books?

CD-ROMs might need shelves but they will no longer be bookshelves. Petroski tells us all this and more, too much more.

He spends pages telling us about the intricacies of chains and locks, the many possible solutions to the problem of bowing suffered by overburdened shelves, the size, shapes and positions of windows in medieval libraries and the vexed question of just where to place bookshelves.

Obsessive-compulsives will love The Book on the Bookshelf. They will not find a single question on the topic unanswered. The rest of us would be well advised to take it in small doses or on those occasions when we urgently need to know, for instance, how St Jerome arranged the books in his study. (There are three prints in this wonderfully illustrated book which provide possible answers, along with the learned professor's inevitable, detailed speculations.)

Vintage

$39.95

* John Connor is an Auckland writer and lecturer.