THE EFFECT OF RELATIVE PRICES. Behold the Cold Spring Shops library. Now imagine no machine-made paper, no mechanical printing, no computerized proofreading, for that matter, no binding, or no electric lighting.


Thus does Duke's Henry Petroski come up with The Book on the Bookshelf. The primary focus of a civil engineer includes elements in compression and tension, suggesting the shelf, but without items to place on those shelves, the engineering problem is different. Scrolls can be placed in pigeonholes, or, for portability, The Ark of The Covenant. The relatively few hand-lettered books (as binding technologies improved) might be kept under lock and key in a special chest. What happens, though, when the emperor or archbishop dies, and the collection passes to the new emperor, or the new archbishop? And what does the emperor or archbishop do to prevent friends from borrowing books and not returning them? Book Review N^o. 14 will recommend The Book on the Bookshelf for providing readable answers to these questions, and much else. There will be no spoilers, but readers ought contemplate the evolution of the library stack, the imperative that paper be kept far from flame, and the tradeoff inherent in securing relatively expensive books yet making them available to researchers. Casual readers, and the need to organize books, let alone systematically catalogue them, come later. (An appendix offers a taxonomy of organization schemes that is itself instructive.) Note that at the Cold Spring Shops library, respecting one principle implies the violation of several others.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)