The Book on the Bookshelf by Henry Petroski

Author:Henry Petroski [Petroski, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-77328-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

In the 1777 edition of Comenius’s book the illustration of the bookseller’s shop was updated to show that the shelves were stocked with bound books with their spines facing out. (photo credit 8.3)

Problems of book size have been felt especially acutely among librarians, some of whom would go to elaborate lengths to address the matter. The New York Public Library, which dates from 1895, made “a careful study” of how to classify books. Octavos were defined as those up to 11½ inches tall, quartos were between 11½ and 19 inches tall, and folios were those in excess of 19 inches tall. If the standard height of a section of bookshelves was taken as 7½ feet, it could be fitted with no more than seven shelves and still allow a tall octavo “to fit snugly.” Another shelf might be squeezed in when shelving fiction, but not nonfiction, for too many volumes of the latter would have to be “turned down” on their fore-edges.

Melvil Dewey worried about the size of bookshelves, as he seems to have worried about everything in libraries, and he believed that “the common error is waste of space by giving too great depth to shelving.” He argued that 80 percent of the books in a circulating library were octavo size, which he abbreviated as O. In a passage demonstrating once again his zeal for spelling reform, he wrote:

The common O is only 15 cm (6 inches) wide. Large O ar seldom over 17.5 cm (7 inches), so that a shelf 20 cm (8 inches) deep allows liberal margin for books and for a little air space. It is common to make shelves 10, 12, and even 14 inches thruout the library. We hav seen them as deep as 20 inches, wasting both lumber and space, and annoying the shelf clerk constantly by the loss of books, which get pusht back into the vacancy behind the row in front.

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