The history of bookshelves can be traced back to 3000 BC. In these long years, many peculiar bookshelves have been born, let's take a look.
1. The earliest bookshelves
The earliest bookshelves date back to the ancient library of Ebla.
The wooden bookshelves there are placed in a very small library, only 5.5 meters long and 4 meters wide.
The clay tablets on bookshelves at the time were not placed with the spine outwards (because clay tablets did not have a "book" spine).
Those "covers" with text are lined up towards the reader, and the distance between the bookshelves is so loose that the reader can go around to the back of it.
There are small clay tablets hanging on both ends of the bookshelf, which are used to sort the tablets.
2. The chain bookshelf
Chained bookshelves emerged in Europe in the Middle Ages, and by 1320, chained libraries had become a routine system in England.
The oldest chain bookshelf is in the Hereford Library in the Midwest of England. There are hundreds of books hidden there, some more than a thousand years old.
Books in chained libraries were chained because at the time a book was worth as much as a farm; but unlike farms, books were movable property that could easily be stolen.
This is why quasi-public libraries across Europe use chains to protect reference materials.
Here's how to chain a book:
For a book with a non-wood cover, glue a piece of metal to the cover, attach the chain, and tie the other end to the wood on the shelf.
For books with wooden covers (usually oak, beech, or pine), use metal buckles to pierce the cover, attach a small lock ring to the metal buckle, and then put the chain on the ring, and connect the other end to the bookshelf.
The chains used to hold books are made up of slender lock rings, each about 3.8 cm to 6.3 cm in length. Most chains have a swivel in the middle to keep the chain from breaking when twisted.
Some bookshelves are also equipped with detachable connecting rods from which the books and chains can be removed.
3. Bookshelves with architectural appendages
In the Ryotaro Shiba Memorial Hall designed by Tadao Ando, there are bookshelves that are 11 meters high, equivalent to three floors, and visitors can use ladders to browse the author's 20,000 private books. However, the design of this kind of bookshelf is for aesthetic considerations, and it is no longer for the convenience of reading or the chance encounter between people and books.
4. Charity bookshelf on the back of the donkey
Ethiopian Reading Project - A library on the back of a donkey. This is a charity event initiated by Ethiopian Ato Yohannes Gebregeorgis.
His original intention was to make it easier to bring books to children in rural and isolated areas of Ethiopia, as he found that "there are so many donkeys in rural areas and so few books".
Escorted by a librarian and donkey breeder, the library on the donkey's back will stay in one village for a while, then pack up and go to the next location.
The program's official announcement states that since its inception in 1998, they have built five schools and seventy-two libraries with the help of Libraries on Donkey's Back and other national library programs. This enables 130,000 children to enjoy the reading pleasure brought by the mobile bookshelf.
5. Mobile bookshelves
Fifth Dimension Bookmobile in Austin, Texas, USA. This is a bookshelf dedicated to collecting science fiction and fantasy books, this mobile bookshelf allows books to spread among the interesting and diverse people in the area. This 1987 book cart served the library for twenty-five years before becoming the current "Fifth Dimension" mobile car library.
6. The New York Public Library's Giant Bookshelf
The New York Public Library was inaugurated on May 23, 1911. The entire building spanned two blocks and was one of the most astonishing library collections and bookshelves in the world at the time.
The Sneed bookshelf in the library is the structural support that maintains the entire building in the true sense.
On October 1, 1905, Time magazine wrote: "This extraordinary building of steel and columns represents the most advanced method and means of placing books on the shelf. It is not like the great libraries of the old world. The huge bookshelf that wraps it is the central point of the whole structure and the treasure protected by this marble palace.
Even today, the secret of this steel labyrinth has long been revealed, and it is still difficult to estimate its huge collection capacity. A shelf that can hold 3.5 million books means that if all the shelves were connected end to end, the total length would be more than 129 kilometers."
7. Convertible Bookshelf
By the end of the twentieth century, in order to meet different consumer needs, the IKEA bookshelf appeared as a distinctive bookshelf.
Users can use it as a set of building blocks and combine them according to different purposes. The giant Sneed's bookshelf arrives in the user's hands as a finished product, while the IKEA bookshelf is a process.
In 2009, the 30th anniversary of the IKEA Billy bookshelf, it had produced more than 41 million; the total length of the end-to-end connection exceeded 70,000 kilometers, almost twice the circumference of the equator. Such bookshelves can be easily retouched, enhanced, destroyed, built, altered and personalized.
Its assembly drawings enter the world of DIY lovers, inventors, city dwellers and makers as a potential object.
