Bookshelf

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.

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).