Bookshelf by Lydia Pyne, Paperback, 9781501307324 | Buy online at The Nile
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Bookshelf

Author: Lydia Pyne   Series: Object Lessons

Paperback

Shows that, whether in the library, office, or home, the bookshelf is where and how we create categories to sort knowledge and experience and that every bookshelf tells a different story.

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Summary

Shows that, whether in the library, office, or home, the bookshelf is where and how we create categories to sort knowledge and experience and that every bookshelf tells a different story.

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Description

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed 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.

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Critic Reviews

“"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." -- Richard Nash, Publisher, Red Lemonade "The Object Lessons series achieves something very close to magic: the books take ordinary--even banal--objects and animate them with a rich history of invention, political struggle, science, and popular mythology. Filled with fascinating details and conveyed in sharp, accessible prose, the books make the everyday world come to life. Be warned: once you've read a few of these, you'll start walking around your house, picking up random objects, and musing aloud: 'I wonder what the story is behind this thing?'"-- Steven Johnson, best-selling author of How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World "The Object Lessons project, edited by game theory legend Ian Bogost and cultural studies academic Christopher Schaberg, commissions short essays and small, beautiful books about everyday objects from shipping containers to toast. The Atlantic hosts a collection of "mini object-lessons", brief essays that take a deeper look at things we generally only glance upon ('Is bread toast only insofar as a human toaster perceives it to be "done?" Is bread toast when it reaches some specific level of nonenzymatic browning?'). More substantive is Bloomsbury's collection of small, gorgeously designed books that delve into their subjects in much more depth." --Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing”

An absorbing meditation on an object of lasting cultural significance. Sydney Morning Herald
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. Richard Nash, Publisher, Red Lemonade

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About the Author

Lydia Pyne (PhD) is a freelance writer, editor, historian, and Research Fellow in the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. She is a contributing editor for The Appendix and a reviewer and essayist for NewPages and New York Journal of Books. She is the author of Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World's Most Famous Human Fossils (Viking, 2016) and, with Stephen J. Pyne, The Last Lost World: Ice Ages, Human Origins, and the Invention of the Pleistocene (Penguin, 2012).

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Product Details

Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc | Bloomsbury Academic USA
Published
24th March 2016
Pages
152
ISBN
9781501307324

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