As Anne Fadiman reminded us in Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader , book-lovers, even those who consider themselves organised, are divided between “splitters” and “lumpers” — or those tolerant of clutter and those not. Writing of the momentous decision to commingle her books with her husband’s, she highlighted the ensuing clash of classifications: he’d be happy putting all sorts of books together on the “Literature” shelves, while she sought to list all her Shakespeare volumes in the chronological order. All our bookshelves are different, and even the way we claw out more shelf space for books will differ. And for those like me who can spend endless minutes sneaking up on another’s bookshelf not so much to form a definite opinion about the owner but as a sort of meditation, a new book called simply ‘Bookshelf’ promises endless insights upon each reread. “What makes a bookshelf a bookshelf?” is a theme running through historian Lydia Pyne’s short yet wide-ranging book. Or, as she quotes Henry Petroski, author of The Book on the Bookshelf as asking: “Is an empty bookshelf an oxymoron?”
The history of the bookshelf is long and varied — after all, storing stone tablets is vastly different from the current practice of organising them by their spine. And now, with e-readers, the whole idea of a bookshelf has undergone changes we are still trying to understand. Yet, there are intriguing parallels. Centuries ago, before the printing revolution brought books within most people’s reach, books would be chained to the shelves. Now, with the easy transportability of e-readers, a new kind of chaining is evident. You cannot lend out e-books as freely — nowhere near — as you can the physical book. As Pyne notes, it is a curious arc: “For readers in earlier centuries, a book was chained because duplicating them was extremely expensive, so there were few copies. E-books are chained now because duplicating them is basically free; chaining digital books insures that the text is still monetarily valuable and artificial scarcity encourages readers to pay.”
With an awe-inspiring historical and geographical scan, Pyne’s book has a cheerful riposte to those who fear, or celebrate, that a digital future will make the bookshelf redundant (or render it as just another shelf): “The bookshelf isn’t going anywhere because there isn’t another object that fills its niche, since what we put where on what shelves shows how we think about the intertwining of ideas, books, and object.”
mini.kapoor@thehindu.co.in
