Skip to main content


The Book on the Bookshelf

Henry Petroski

Paperback

List Price: 16.95*
* Individual store prices may vary.

Description

From the author of the highly praised The Pencil and The Evolution of Useful Things comes another captivating history of the seemingly mundane: the book and its storage.

Most of us take for granted that our books are vertical on our shelves with the spines facing out, but Henry Petroski, inveterately curious engineer, didn't.  As a result, readers are guided along the astonishing evolution from papyrus scrolls boxed at Alexandria to upright books shelved at the Library of Congress. Unimpeachably researched, enviably written, and charmed with anecdotes from Seneca to Samuel Pepys to a nineteenth-century bibliophile who had to climb over his books to get into bed, The Book on the Bookshelf is indispensable for anyone who loves books.


Praise For The Book on the Bookshelf

"For anyone interested in the craft of reading, [this book] is a compulsive necessity." --The New York Times Book Review

"A fascinating history of two related common objects, impeccably documented and beautifully illustrated." --Civilization

"After reading this book, you will not look at a book or a bookshelf in the same way." --Seattle Times

"If 'God is in the details,' then those seeking God should read Petroski's books." --Library Journal

Vintage, 9780375706394, 304pp.

Publication Date: September 12, 2000



About the Author

Henry Petroski is the Alexander S.Vesic Professor of Engineering and Professor of History at Duke University, where he also serves as chairman of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.
https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780375706394
www.indiebound.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-50
233652
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:MQD6GCCP32SVPAS6JMD6OOWFIONCEYO5
<urn:uuid:6c44b958-4bfb-451a-8c0c-494c5125fd0c>
2020-11-29T15:13:09Z
35.243.151.52
text/html
sha1:GREHMGULGFFF7AMUYQOKQJGM7UJHP37F
<urn:uuid:1b7d937a-39d4-4c99-ad43-98a7fa336fb7>
https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780375706394
response
<urn:uuid:df8ad262-2bff-40bd-a6f8-f25b730594c9>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-50
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November/December 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-240.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/