Take a look at your bookshelf. What do you see? Bindings, titles, paperbacks ...? No, I said take a look at the shelf. The furniture not the contents. It is not something I'd paid much attention to, but after reading The Book on the Bookshelf by Henry Petroski, I'm looking at the lines of steel and wood with new eyes.
His books is, put simply, a history of the bookshelf. Must be short, you might think, but the story is considerably longer and more complex than you'd think.
First, of course, came the scroll. Not, on the whole, terribly convenient. The Iliad would have filled a dozen rolls, "nearly 300 running feet of papyrus" in total. Which provides an explanation of why the separation of words by spaces did not become general until after the invention of printing; it would have added 30 feet to Homer.
The valuable scrolls had their own slip-cases, sets were usually kept in boxes "not unlike a modern hat box", while a "library" had a series of pigeonholes. But in one of those wonderful ancient/modern parallels, Seneca the Younger complained about the "evils of book-collecting" -:
"It is in the homes of the idlest men that you find the biggest libraries - range upon range of books, ceiling high. For nowadays a library is one of the essential fittings of a home, like a bathroom ... collected for mere show, to ornament the walls of the house."
I've read elsewhere that the Christian preference for the codex helped it defeat the pagan, scroll-based religion, but here is an earlier story. Papyrus was for many centuries the writing material of choice, but when Ptolemy Philadelphus in the second century BC forbid its export, Pliny's Natural History reports that King Eumenes II of the Greek Kingdom of Pergamun, who wanted to establish a grand library, instead ordered the preparation of sheepskins to be used instead. The material was called charta pergamena, which led to the word "parchment". (It had, however, been known earlier, if less used.) And parchment could be sewed to hold the codex together, which papyrus could not.)
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