When perusing a library or bookstore, after admiring the initial books displayed on tables, one is often met with shelves of books. More often than not, these books are filed with their spines out, giving readers minimal information like the book’s title, author, and a sliver of the book cover’s aesthetic. Though today we might not think twice about this organizational choice, or perhaps even think it’s the most logical filing option, this method of storing and labeling books is relatively new. Historically, books have been stored in various positions: horizontal, fore-edge out, open on lecterns, among other ways, but rarely vertically with the spine outward, as is seen commonly today. Though the spine is essential to the book, as it binds the codex together and is central to how books are identified, its history is overlooked. Tracing the evolution of book storage, from tablets to codices, chained lecterns, and early shelving systems, reveals how the spine gradually transformed from a structural necessity to an integral aspect of the book.

Before the side-bound book, written information took on different forms, notably tablets and scrolls, requiring varying ways of storage and showing the beginning of book-storing methods. Marking the start of book history is the clay tablet from the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia. Here, the earliest recorded written language, cuneiform, was born around 3100 B.C.E. Cuneiform physically manifested onto clay tablets that Amaranth Borsuk describes as, “generally rectangular with a slightly convex bulge” and ranged from “the size of a matchbook to that of a large cell phone — and could rest stably on a flat surface for storage or consultation” (Borsuk 7). In the article, “How did the ancient Mesopotamians archive their cuneiform tablets?” Assyriologist and professor at the University of Hamburg, Dr. Cécile Michel, discusses the various ways in which clay tablets were stored depending on their classification and purpose. For scholarly texts, like medical texts, literary narratives, poems, mathematical texts, etc, Dr. Michel notes that “tablets were often stored in niches in walls built of unbaked clay bricks.” For royal and official documents, e.g., administrative texts, accounting texts, treaties, and more, Italian archaeologists discovered a room in the palace of Elba containing over 17,000 clay tablets and fragments that had been arranged by content on wooden shelves that had since rotted. Some royal and religious texts were also either displayed for people to read or stacked and buried in the foundation of buildings to invoke divine favor or preserve knowledge. Regarding private documents, Dr. Michel discusses how “private individuals, for their part, kept dozens, hundreds and sometimes even more than a thousand cuneiform tablets in one or more rooms of their homes, making up their private archives.” She also notes that tablets have been found in baskets and boxes with labels as a means of storing and organizing them.

While the Mesopotamians developed their clay tablets, the Egyptians used papyrus from the Nile River to create scrolls, which became the primary method of recording information in Egyptian, Greek, and Roman culture. Scrolls were continuous rolls of papyrus, or later, parchment, that allowed for continuous reading. In these early forms of books, there was no equivalent to a spine that could bear identifying information, making the storage systems reliant on containers, tags, or spatial memory rather than visual labeling. In Henry Petroski’s The Book on the Bookshelf, he explains how scrolls were then kept in various ways, from being upright in boxes to laid flat on shelves that were further divided into pigeonholes. When bound manuscripts, or codices, are developed and introduced to differing societies, these varying methods of organization would affect how codices, which later become the familiar bound books of today, are stored.

As books were being introduced into early societies, they existed alongside scrolls and tablets, making for an interesting transitional period of storing multiple book forms while the codex simultaneously evolved into the bound book familiar today. Though scrolls were a popular book mode, a disadvantage of the scroll was its clunkiness while reading. Due to the scroll’s rolled form, they required something to weigh down a side of it, whether it be two hands holding either side or paperweights weighing down a side while a hand held the roll. Not to mention, scrolls were long and would take up a considerable bit of room. These inconveniences needed a solution. In China, the solution was folding scrolls back and forth, creating an accordion fold and form. Unlike the scroll, this accordion-folded book allowed people to access any part of the book, a convenient and welcome change that Borsuk says “play[ed] a key role in…establishing the codex in China” (36). This format represented a crucial step toward the codex, which continued to evolve across different cultures. In Greece, the codex took form after the Assyrian tablet and was a bundle of folded pages sewn together. This meant spines existed on books, as pages were sewn together, but only served as a functional feature rather than a decorative one or a directly informative one. Roman poet Horace suggested that these grouped, folded pages provided a lightweight alternative to the wax tablets used. This convenient and easy-to-make form of book would then be produced alongside scrolls.

Though the codex had its advantages and seems like the better design choice, this did not mean scrolls simply disappeared in production within the next decade. Instead, scrolls and codices were stored together, as previously mentioned. In this time, codices and scrolls were stacked and tucked away into closed cabinets or piled into trunks, keeping everything safely concealed. Reasons for the closed cabinets varied as Petroski mentions that a “clash of forms may have been what drove the widespread adoption of the closed closet,” or perhaps book owners “might have worried about the moisture accumulating, or dust collecting on the rolls, or vermin crawling into them, ” or maybe even “trouble with thievery or unauthorized borrowing of their scrolls” (34) caused book owners to opt for enclosed shelves. This approach of closed cabinets contrasts with contemporary book storage practices, in which books are usually out on open shelves or behind glass to emphasize visibility and aesthetic value. Though scrolls and codices coexisted for a significant amount of time, between the third and fourth centuries, archaeological evidence shows that the number of scrolls decreased while codex books increased in production. This shift in increased codex book production would consequently change how books would be stored and displayed.

As book production developed and expanded in the West, due to the rise of Christianity with monastic manuscripts, books became increasingly valued, leading to storage practices, such as chaining books, that emphasized protection and control of knowledge. Up until the thirteenth century, monasteries essentially had a monopoly on book production due to systematic influence like St. Benedict of Nursia issuing a rule requiring Benedictine monks to read daily, complete a book by Lent, and carry books while traveling, which emphasized literacy, having financial support for supplies, and having dedicated infrastructures, like a scriptorium, to concentrate on hand-copying texts. With these resources and rules in place, some monks became dedicated scribes, calligraphers, correctors, and rubricators for book production and trade or sale. In The Book, Borsuk describes how monks who served as scribes “spent six hours a day hunched before the page in a cold scriptorium, incurring back-aches, headaches, eye strain, and cramps, all while wasting away the daylight,” showing how tedious, time-consuming, and miserable the task of creating books was. Considering all the time and labor that went into crafting books, protection was warranted.

To work around these concerns of theft and destruction, monasteries initially used locked chests and later, libraries. As Petroski mentions, chests were “not much to protect the books from wholesale thieves — for those were to be kept off the monastery grounds — as to secure the books from surreptitious borrowers” (44). Though chests were convenient for transportation and a familiar way of storing books, the number of chests increased as more books were being produced or bequeathed to monasteries from deceased owners, like bishops. To accommodate the growing collections, books were placed next to each other in chests “with one of their edges facing up” (Petroski, 57). From there, chests were upended and fitted with shelves, creating an armarium. Armariums with fitted shelves made book care and retrieval easier, thus more apt for keeping a larger number of books. As collections grew in monasteries, and later universities and churches, separate rooms — libraries — became dedicated to housing books. Having dedicated rooms for books meant that books could be displayed more openly on tables or with unlocked armariums while also being protected behind the single locked door of the library, reflecting a shift toward centralizing control. Though there was more security from the library, this didn’t solve the issue of books disappearing occasionally.

With separate lockable rooms for books, there was a natural evolution toward more efficient and protective bookcases. Armaria, though useful for storage could not just be crowded into rooms as it would obstruct one’s light source or conceal the acts of book mutilation one might perform. A solution to this problem, then, was to not keep books in armaria, but to put them out on display on lecterns, which was eventually done. Lecterns had sloped surfaces for books to be displayed cover up and side by side. To prevent books from disappearing, books were chained to lecterns, or later, horizontal shelves above lecterns, with fore-edges out either stacked horizontally of filed vertically, reinforcing the idea that books were meant to remain stationary and open for consultation. In this way, the spine of a book became an anchor, and still, not an essential identifier of the book. The addition of chains to books was a logical step for the Middle Ages’ libraries that also symbolized the Church’s gatekeeping of knowledge, as books were not allowed for further reading outside of their libraries. Not to mention, the lack of obvious visual identifiers, like titles or authors, would force a person to be somewhat familiar with the collection or rely on someone with that knowledge. As time continued to on and more books came to fruition due to the printing press and moveable type, storing books with chains became a difficult task, prompting the chained shelving system to eventually change.

The medieval lectern storing system developed into the stall system as the lectern system became increasingly difficult and frustrating to navigate, prompting a necessary solution. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the lectern storage system was still in use, but its usability became increasingly difficult and alarmingly expansive. This expansiveness can be attributed to Gutenberg’s printing press, which made books easier to produce. The Book on the Bookshelf notes that “when Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester was petitioned by Oxford University in 1444 to help with the building of a new library…. ‘according to the petitioners, ‘should any student be pouring over a single volume…he keeps three or four students away on account of the books being chained so closely together,'” (Petroski 72). This illustrates how the lectern system demanded substantial space, as Oxford University was petitioning for a new library, since existing facilities could not accommodate students’ needs for reading and work, while chained books further limited access by restricting movement, thus keeping “three of four students away” (Petroski 72). A temporary solution included installing shelves either above or below lecterns with books stashed away horizontally, which inevitably involved chains tangling. The more sustainable solution: the stall system. In the stall system, books were stored vertically on the shelves. Even though this was a step toward the contemporary style of shelving, books were filed with their fore-edges out, spines inward to the shelf, and still chained. In order to navigate this new structure in libraries, a bookcase would have a table of contents framed at the end of the case with books listed in order, as can be seen in the Hereford Cathedral’s chained library. To find a book, one would have to reference and remember a book’s number on a bookcase’s table of contents to find its position on a shelf. But, sometimes, a book’s fore-edges, clasps, ribbons, or other devices that held the book closed would be labeled with distinguishing words. In this way, spines were no more meant to be perceived than the underside of a desk or the back of a computer is.

It was during the sixteenth century that a shift to shelving books with their spines out and labeling spines developed as bookbinding methods changed to include less three-dimensional ornaments or designs, making it easier to file books vertically, and allowed bookbinders and book owners to experiment with decorating the spine. Prior to the sixteenth century, it was common for books to be bound in elaborate fashions, with their boards covered in leather or fabric and sometimes decorated with metal bosses, carvings, and jewels. These three-dimensional decorations made it virtually impossible for books to be filed vertically, hence another reason for books to have been filed horizontally. As time passed, and tooled leather bindings became more fashionable than repousse or other three-dimensional ornaments, filing books vertically became a viable option for organization. With this shift toward tooled leather bindings also came an opportunity for bookbinders to decorate book spines to a degree similar to the front and back covers. This did not mean that books were then suddenly filed with spines out, just that bookbinding was changing in a way that would make the shift to books being stored spine out possible. In this time as books increased in numbers and came to have a more standardized look, with book owners finding it fashionable to have the book collections bound to match, marking spines with some identification of the book’s content was necessary. The identifying markings were the book’s title and/or author, and date of edition, though the format of which these appeared was not standardized. Petroski notes “that is not to say that all books in a library would yet have been shelved with spines out, as demonstrated by the fore-edge-painted books of the Pillone library, which date from about 1580” (107).

Stepping into the eighteenth century, as books became more standardized in binding and size, the spine’s new role was not just as the backbone of books, but as an essential communicative component of the book. In The Book on the Bookshelf, Petroski focuses on Samuel Pepys’ book collection in the early eighteenth century, which featured books “shelved spine out, as had come to be the fashionable thing to do” (134). This indicates that the practice of filing books fore-edges out had shifted to favor filing books with their spine’s out over some time. As previously mentioned, books started to don titles, the author, and the edition date on the spine, which became a more common practice as time continued. From the eighteenth century and on, filing books spine out, became a method of storage practiced still in the twenty-first century. As this way of storage became more standard, book owners and books spaces, like libraries, could experiment with different organization systems, like the Dewey Decimal System developed in the nineteenth century.

The history of the book spine in relation to book storage and organization is a relatively long and significant one that is often overlooked. The history of the spine reveals how contemporary book spines were products of changing book technologies and attitudes. For centuries, book spines were stored in a way that concealed them and rendered them irrelevant to readers. Being filed this way reflected how systems of authority restricted, preserved, and controlled access to knowledge. It also echoed previous methods of filing tablets and scrolls, which were often stacked. As books increased in production, standardization, and were more widely available, the spine’s function no longer became one of pure structural functionality. The spine became a communicative device on a book. This transformed book spaces, like libraries, into places that could foster curiosity, as one could peruse book sections and look at titles, rather than going in knowing exactly what one was looking for. The shelving practice of spine out that we are familiar with today was not an immediate solution to book storage problems in the Middle Ages, but one that developed from evolving material technologies and cultural priorities. By examining the history of book spines and storage, one comes to understand that the modern shelf is not just an organizational convenience, but a reflection of how knowledge came to be seen, accessed, and shared.

Works Cited

Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. The MIT Press, 2018.

Michel, Cécile. How Did the Ancient Mesopotamians Archive Their Cuneiform Tablets?, University of Hamburg, 13 Sept. 2023, www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/publications/mesopotamia/2023-09-13.html.

Petroski, Henry. The Book on the Bookshelf. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010.