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Almost every business building and home has a need for a heavy-duty bookshelf of some kind, either as a store of fine literature, reference material, archival data or other forms of paper information.
Even as offices go digital, that need for a paper trail has not entirely gone away, but what is equally as fascinating is that the need for a bookshelf to store, order and protect written information predates the invention of the codex book design itself.
In fact, many of the architectural and social considerations that many people would consider to be associated with modern bookkeeping, both of the literal and financial variety, were widely discussed and even satirised long before the earliest surviving books as we know them.
To understand why, we need to look at the origins and purpose of literature before the era of universal literacy.
Seneca And The Lament Of The Armaria
For as long as there have been writing methods and materials, there has been a need to store them for future generations, and the issue of storing religious text, songs, correspondence and complaints about copper quality has existed since the Babylonian city of Ur.
One of the earliest examples of such a storage system was the armarium found in Ancient Roman buildings such as the lost Library of Alexandria.
Initially, the armarium was a stone inlay that worked as an exceptionally heavy-duty shelf used for storing rolls and scrolls in an age before owning or writing books was especially common and the storage mediums involved were both very bulky and very heavy.
However, wealthier Romans in the later era of the republic would eventually start to own books of their own, storing them in beautiful wood and ivory cupboards and bookcases also known as armaria.
Whilst some of these collections would be owned by scholars and patrons of literary arts, far more of them were treated more like an ancient version of a coffee table book, with the book being far more of an ornament or a showpiece than necessarily being read.
The literacy rate in Ancient Rome was not especially high, and so many of the wealthy owners would buy ancient books with no intention of reading them.
This was something that raised the particular ire of Roman writer and satirist Seneca, who would in his dialogue On Peace of Mind criticise the hoarding of books with no expectation for them to be read or studied.
He would argue that one can collect as many books as he wants as long as they are not for show, an aphorism still used today to criticise people who collect books as a display of intellect rather than as something to actually read.
He then noted the common use of bookcases made from citrus wood and ivory, stacked up to the ceiling, filled with the works of historians and orators, even joking that a library was as important to a house as a bathroom was.
All of this was before the development of the codex, the early form of book made using vellum sheets and primitive bookbinding, and long before the work of Johannes Gutenberg, the man who invented the modern movable type printing press.
For more information on How Heavy-Duty Bookshelves Existed Before Books talk to UK Shelving Ltd