Even virtually, it continues unabashed, as a metaphor, like browsing. 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.

More substantive is Bloomsbury's collection of small, gorgeously designed books that delve into their subjects in much more depth.' -Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing, 'As the page is to the book, so is the bookshelf to our culture, that is the lesson of this delightful and stimulating essay. 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?'). 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. Filled with fascinating details and conveyed in sharp, accessible prose, the books make the everyday world come to life. 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.

'As the page is to the book, so is the bookshelf to our culture, that is the lesson of this delightful and stimulating essay.

Bookshelf by Lydia Pyne