While I do still believe that TikTok heralds the final wasting away of our attention span in hypercapitalist modernity, this one is definitely accurate!

Especially before the modern printing press was invented and popularised (circa mid-15th century), books were incredibly rare and manufactured entirely by hand. They were made almost entirely by and for people working in religious institutions. Even after the printing press came to early modern England, books were still incredibly expensive and rarely seen by an average person. I’ve written on the cost and storage of books in early modern England in another post, so I won’t repeat myself here, but suffice it to say that the church, printer, and university (still arguably the pedagogical wing of the church at this point) were practically the only institutions with major collections of books.

And yes, in these institutions and because of these pressures, book handling and storage practices looked very different to now, as the video maker rightly suggests.

Books were often stored vertically with their fore-edge (the part of the book opposite the spine) facing towards the potential reader. The TikTok is right in part that this prevented damage to the skin bindings of the spines, but it’s also worth noting that the beautiful, carefully designed spines and typography we see in modern book design are a result of commercial pressures and mass-technological innovations that were absent in the professional, highly specialised institutional contexts of five hundred years ago. Key information—authors, books titles, location references, etc.—were usually written by hand onto the fore-edge pages instead, if at all.

Books were also chained as claimed, though often to the shelves themselves rather than purely around the binding as shown in the video. Chaining was the result of both the expense of early modern books and the professional context of the institutions in which they were stored. It was normal to consult books at or very near their shelves, and institutions certainly didn’t want their incredibly expensive (if not unique!) texts disappearing into the night. As the TikToker notes—perhaps because he has a financial interest in the condition of books—these chains also helped spread the force used to remove them from the shelves while keeping binding and spines flush. You’ll sometimes see clasps used as a secondary method to keep books shut neatly, and as another security measure. If you ever fancy seeing a chained library in person, a few, like at Hereford cathedral and at my old alma mater, still exist, and you can visit them!

When did spine-edge shelving begin? As with all cultural practices and norms, it’s really hard to say. One historian, Henry Petroski, has claimed that Jacques Auguste De Thou was one of the first serious book collectors to store a large collection spine out in late 16th century France, but he also notes that librarians had often turned spines outward when there was a risk of ‘kicks and scuffs from scholars’ (p. 86) or dropping from a height, such as when books were either stored below desk spaces or up above the readers’ heads. It’s also safe to say that technology and economic developments undoubtedly had a hand in promoting the spine as the ‘front’ of a book: the development of pasteboard (early 16th century), dust jackets (early 19th century), and cloth binding (early 19th century) allowed for easier and cheaper decoration of spines, while it was never particularly straightforward to decorate the fore-edge at meaningful scale. Meanwhile, the need for books to actively advertise themselves with their typography and design meant that the spine and covers became ideal surfaces for commercial-aesthetic expression.