Bookcase - Writing About Bookcases

Writing About Bookcases

Practical

• The construction and arrangement of bookcases was learnedly discussed in the light of experience by W. E. Gladstone in the Nineteenth Century for March 1890, entitled "On Books and the Housing of Them". An early type of mobile shelving made of steel is sometimes said to have been invented by Gladstone.
• The Book on the Bookshelf by Henry Petroski (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999) also discusses the shelving of books in some detail.
• Living with Books by Alan Powers (London: Mitchell Beazley, 1999) deals with accommodating books at home.
• Lunacy & the Arrangement of Books by Terry Belanger (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2003) also deals with the subject.
• The Pictorial Catalogue; mural decoration in libraries: the Lyell Lectures, Oxford 1972-1973 by André Masson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981) deals with the systems used in early modern European libraries.
• See also:
  • Sympson the Joiner and the early glazed bookcases made for Samuel Pepys
  • The Cottonian Library where each bookcase was named after a prominent figure in ancient Rome whose bust stood on the top.

Literature and film

• In several stories, a secret area is hidden behind a bookcase built into the wall. The entrance is typically opened when a particular book on the shelf is pulled off or uses a switch in a statue, usually under the head. One particularly humorous example is found in the film Young Frankenstein, when Doctor Frankenstein's laboratory is opened via a bookcase triggered by a candle.
• H. C. Bunner wrote a comic poem "Shake, Mulleary and Go-ethe" "I have a bookcase which is what / Many much better men have not / There are no books inside, for books / I am afraid might spoil its looks, etc."
• In this passage from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novel Anne of Green Gables, the author refers to a bookcase; “Thomas she had a bookcase in her sitting room with glass doors."
• Beatrix Potter referred to a bookcase in her children's tales The Original Peter Rabbit Books in this passage; “The bookcase and the bird-cage refused to go into the mouse-hole.”