I picked this book up from a remaindered books table at Barnes & Noble thinking it was a book about books, a subject that interests me a lot.  It turns out this a book about storing books, a subject I didn’t know interested me, but it turns out it does.  Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and history at Duke, begins his story sitting in his study at home looking at his books.  His attention wanders to the structures holding his books in place, and from there he is off and running.  Using ancient accounts and old wood cuts, he describes how scrolls, codexes, and early manuscripts were stored in ancient libraries and later in medieval monasteries.  I learned that early books were stored with their pages facing out and were chained to their shelves for protection.  Study carels and book shelves were placed under windows in order to take advantage of natural light. 

With the invention of printing, book storage became an even greater problem as the number of books began to increase geometrically and their price came down.  Europe’s great universities needed to invent ways to store knowledge and make it available to scholars.  Petroski deals with issues such as the downward weight of books on the structures designed to support them.  He shows how the sag in individual shelves from the books’ weight causes damage to the books themselves.  He examines modern libraries as depositories for the huge numbers of books now extant and explores the future of electronic books which could serve to eliminate the weight and space issues raised by large numbers of printed books.  Along the way, Petroski manages to make a topic I thought would be dreary interesting. 

As this volume becomes more focused on shelving, the limitations of libraries as custodians of books and book storage emerge.  Concern for uniformity of presentation always trumps content A the quest for increased shelving increases in importance.  Petroski scarcely mentions the needs of readers as book storage technology continues to dominate the design and construction of libraries.  It becomes easy to see how Melvil Dewey, the notorious  anti-Semitic founder of the Lake Placid Club, could so conveniently find specific slots in which to place people as well as books.

I fear that electronic shelving and cataloging systems spell the death knell for one of the truest pleasures of both libraries and book stores – browsing.  I cannot tell how many books I’ve found for reading and purchase by going to a shelf looking for a particular volume and coming away with another.  The look of books on the shelf, their feel in the hand, even their smell adds immeasurably to their pleasure.  While Petroski has provided a useful and interesting book about book storage, I’m afraid he has also predicted a future where we loose one problem only to gain another.