Petroski 1999

Petroski, Henry. The Book on the Bookshelf. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

1853: Charles Goodyear had a book printed on rubber sheets and bound in rubber (19)

carrels within chain libraries like computer terminals in today's libraries -- books pushed out to make space (75)

armaria came to be known as "book presses" -- "bookcase" and "press" became interchangeable (86); like bookbinder's press or letter press

fore-edge paintings: "16th-century Italian book collector, Odorico Pillone, had the artist Cesare Vecellio paint the fore-edges of his books with scenes appropriate to their contents" (119-120); 172 books were decorated, two painted upside-down; lettered over with literary identifiers, probably to identify books; clasps removed on three volumes so as not to obstruct fore-edge painting

dos a dos bindings, two books bound with three boards (125-6)

sheets in booksellers' shop stacked in sheets, sometimes in bins that were labeled; "the labels on the bins may very well have come from the printed sheets themselves, for it is not uncommon to find books printed in the latter part of the 17c 'where the printer has printed the title of the book vertically on a leaf that would otherwise have been blank.' It has been speculated that these titles were to serve as labels that could be cut out and pasted on the spine of a plain calf binding or 'inside the cover to form a flap over the 'fore-edge' oif the book was placed spine inward on the shelf." (150)

19c English chemist Humphrey Davy would disfigure his books because he didn't want to be tempted to waste time reading anything twice (156)

microfilm developed between WWI-WWII; "generally was expected to be as revolutionary as printing from moveable type" (212); was anticipated that books would be replaced by microfilm which projected texts onto walls; "such projected books were, in fact, available for hospitalized veterans in the wake of the Second World War, but 'experience began to show that there was great resistance from readers to the inconvenience of having to read through an apparatus'" (213)

Richard de Bury complaining about students lazily pressing flowers between the pages of their books (227)