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Bookshelf

Object Lessons

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Bookshelf

By: Lydia Pyne
Narrated by: Rachel Handshaw
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Bloomsbury presents Bookshelf by Lydia Pyne, read by Rachel Handshaw.

Object Lessons is a series of short books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Every shelf is different and every bookshelf tells a different story. One bookshelf can creak with character in a bohemian coffee shop and another can groan with gravitas in the Library of Congress. Writer and historian Lydia Pyne finds bookshelves to be holders not just of books but of so many other things: values, vibes, and verbs that can be contained and displayed in the buildings and rooms of contemporary human existence. With a shrewd eye toward this particular moment in the history of books, Pyne takes the reader on a tour of the bookshelf that leads critically to this juncture: amid rumors of the death of book culture, why is the life of the bookshelf in full bloom?

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.©2016 Lydia Pyne (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Aesthetics Literary History & Criticism Philosophy Social Sciences Words, Language & Grammar Writing & Publishing
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Critic reviews

An absorbing meditation on an object of lasting cultural significance.
As the page is to the book, so is the bookshelf to our culture, that is the lesson of this delightful and stimulating essay. Anything can happen on a page, so too, we learn, a bookshelf partakes of that astonishing range of possibility, circumscribed only by rectilinear geometry, a mode nonpareil of storing, displaying, distributing, assembling, categorizing and contextualizing knowledge. Even virtually, it continues unabashed, as a metaphor, like browsing. A lovely glimpse of the joy and scale of human culture endeavor, its forms and functions, contexts and containers.
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