“What makes a bookshelf a bookshelf?” is a theme running through historian Lydia Pyne’s short yet wide-ranging book. And now, with e-readers, the whole idea of a bookshelf has undergone changes we are still trying to understand. Centuries ago, before the printing revolution brought books within most people’s reach, books would be chained to the shelves. All our bookshelves are different, and even the way we claw out more shelf space for books will differ. Or, as she quotes Henry Petroski, author of The Book on the Bookshelf as asking: “Is an empty bookshelf an oxymoron?”The history of the bookshelf is long and varied — after all, storing stone tablets is vastly different from the current practice of organising them by their spine.

Source: The Hindu July 02, 2016 20:37 UTC