Bookshelf

This short volume belongs to the Object Lessons series, a set of compact, carefully designed books that each examine a single everyday object. Here the object is the bookshelf. Historian Lydia Pyne considers how shelving changes from one setting to the next, comparing a worn, lively shelf in a café with a stately one in the Library of Congress.

Pyne treats shelves as more than places to store books. They also carry ideas, moods and the activities people perform around them, and they furnish the homes, offices and public rooms of modern life. Her argument follows the bookshelf through its history to the present moment.

The book confronts a familiar worry: people have repeatedly predicted the decline of print culture, yet the bookshelf keeps thriving. Pyne asks what that persistence means. The Object Lessons series is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.