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On Books and the Housing of Them
Gladstone's treatise on how to manage one's personal library.
48 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1890
8 people are currently reading
87 people want to read
About the author
William Ewart Gladstone
670 books19 followersOne of the most prominent figures in nineteenth century British politics. Known as G.O.M, which stood for 'Grand Old Man' (although his rival Benjamin Disraeli joked that it was actually 'God's Only Mistake')
William Ewart Gladstone served four times as Liberal Prime Minister (1868 - 1874, 1880 - 1885, 1886 and 1892 - 1894). As such, he dominated the latter half of the century.
His hobbies included reforming prostitutes, felling trees and insulting Benjamin Disraeli. Despite a mutual dislike between Gladstone and Queen Victoria, he was one of the most successful politicians of his day.
His rule was dominated by the Irish Question, but his reforms were far-reaching and addressed a wide range of domestic and foreign policy issues.
William Ewart Gladstone served four times as Liberal Prime Minister (1868 - 1874, 1880 - 1885, 1886 and 1892 - 1894). As such, he dominated the latter half of the century.
His hobbies included reforming prostitutes, felling trees and insulting Benjamin Disraeli. Despite a mutual dislike between Gladstone and Queen Victoria, he was one of the most successful politicians of his day.
His rule was dominated by the Irish Question, but his reforms were far-reaching and addressed a wide range of domestic and foreign policy issues.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
October 6, 2017
Given how much I love my books and the plans I have for built in bookcases in our new home, I had to buy this. However the scale of Gladstone's plans are rather grander then mine. A quick and historically interesting book.
December 31, 2025
First, if you are my friend on Goodreads, you're probably thankful that I finished this book so that you'll no longer see it in the weekly Goodreads update emails along with the actual books I read! Please know, although it says that I started the book in February 2016, it did NOT actually take me ten years to read this. Rather, it's proof once again that I just never remember to read anything in the Kindle app; if it's not tangible, I forget about it.
Deciding that I wanted to use the end of this year to close loops on long-open small projects, I went back to re-start this short book from the beginning. Originally published in 1890, four-time UK Prime Minister William Gladstone (in between his third and fourth terms), it's not what you'd expect a sixty-year politician to write, but it's charming in its reflection of the type of man he was and era from which he came. On the one hand, it's philosophical and written with exquisite knowledge of history; on the other, it ignores the existence of women (as readers and as writers), assumes a commonality of knowledge that was unlikely universally shared at the time and has certainly been forgotten, and is presented with such pinpoint specificity that the kids these days might apply the term "neurospicy" to his approach.
Certainly, the short book does cover "both" topics, books and the necessary issue of housing them. However, his interest in the former is really only in terms of the rapid increase of the number of them so as to create difficulty in finding space to present them in one's personal library.
His first concern is the evident mass increase in the number of books in existence, something that seems quaint now. Turning from the population increase (one should wryly note that the population of the planet was only about 1.5 billion at the time of publication) and the associated fears of food shortages, he quotes the New Testament, "...I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written." Books multiplied faster than people, even 135 years ago.
Gladstone has some poetic things to say about books, such as, The binding of a book is the dress with which it walks out into the world. The paper, type and ink are the body, in which its soul is domiciled. And these three, soul, body, and habilament, are a triad which ought to be adjusted to one another by the laws of harmony and good sense."
The fast increase in books dispensed with, Gladstone acknowledges his chief concern, that it's hard to display and access so many books such as are (or at least, were) available, and there's some discourse as to the Bodleian Library at Oxford. He takes off for some tangential galavanting, such as bemoaning "specialism," or sub-categorization, and urges, with what a modern reader may assume is humor (though I'm not certain), "Let us bow our heads to the inevitable, the day of encylopaedic learning has gone by. It may perhaps be said that that sun set with Leibnitz. But as little learning is only dangerous when it forgets that it is little, so specialism is only dangerous when it forgets that it is special." OK, then!
He continues on, thinking of Cicero and Macaulay, noting that "Books are the voices of the dead. They are a main instrument of communion with the vast human procession of the other world. They are the allies of the thought of man." He speaks of books as the "bonds and rivets of the race, onward from that time when they were first written on the tablets of Babylonia and Assyria..." He contemplates Roman times, when books were copied by enslaved persons to increase the availability, and how the abundance of (quasi) books of that era followed by a "famine of more than a thousand years." He traces libraries of the East and the West, but focuses on English, French, and Italian collections.
Finally, Gladstone reaches his main issue, one third of the way into the book, that "The purchase of a book is commonly supposed to end, even for the most scrupulous customer, with the payment of the bookseller's bill. But this is a mere popular superstition. Such payment is not the last, but the first in terms of a series of goodly length. If we wish to give the block a lease of life equal to that of the pages, the first condition is that it should be bound..." and we are left to realize how naive we are to the ways of the past, to cloth coverings if we cannot afford fancily bound and bejeweled books, and then:
"Well, then, bound or not, the book must of necessity by put into a bookcase. And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, should be catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil! Unless..." and that "unless" imagines the "princely mansions" of his era where "where books, in thousands upon thousands, are jumbled together with no more arrangement than a sack of coals; where not even the sisterhood of consecutive volumes has been respected; where undoubtedly an intending reader may at the mercy of Fortune take something from the shelves that is a book; but where no particular book can except by the purest accident, be found."
As a Certified Professional Organizer, I want to say, Gladstone, man, I feel you!
Gladstone sets a list of questions people have as to what to do about the impending burial under books, and then, "Without answering in detail, I shall assume that the book-buyer is a book-lover, that his love is a tenacious, not a transitory love, and that for him, the question is best how to keep his books." And, indeed, with the remaining two-thirds of this treatise, he skips quickly past the necessity of keeping one's library "sound and dry, the apartment airy, and with abundant light" to focus on three essentials: economy, good arrangement, and accessibility with the smallest possible expenditure of time.
I will leave to the reader to decide whether Gladstone's extensive, precious, exquisite, and supervisory approach to how to build a bookshelf, to what depth a shelf should measure, which books should face where, which sizes of books (octavos vs. quartos vs. folios) should be shelved together, whether one should employ a ladder (nope) or footstool (yep), where placement should acknowledge windows, how smaller shelves can serve as tables, whether the shelving units should be fixed (yes) or mobile (generally, no), and so on.
He even helpfully notes that The cost of the method which I have adopted later in life, and have endeavored to explain, need not exceed one penny per volume." Dude, not even Ikea can match that!
At this point, having exhausted his focus on the hardware (if you'll pardon the modern expression) of housing books, he turns philosophical and speaks of the "society of books" and notes that not all books, just as not all men, are equally sociable and thus do not mix well. He then circles back to "specialism," the collection of large quantities of books, and what to do about "book cemeteries" where so many books exist that the housing of them for personal use exceeds possibility.
For that, he notes that, "Undoubtedly, the idea of book-cemeteries such as I have supposed is very formidable, and that if they must exist, they "must receive as many bodies as possible. The condemned will live ordinarily in pitch darkness, yet so that when wanted, they may be called into the light." And thus Gladstone continues on once more (and into the footnotes) to explain how a "solid mass of books" could be accessed, via weights, pulleys, trams, and so on, in minute detail.
Gladstone's erudition is on display, as is his of-his-time narrow recognition of readers who were (and are) not genteel. His failure to anticipate paperback/softcover books, which would be widely available a mere 25 years hence (popularized for the men in WWI trenches) is understandable; certainly, he could not have imagined the wealth of traditionally and self-published books available every year, let alone formats ranging from ebooks to audiobooks.
Aspects of the concepts Gladstone covers are timely; others are stuffy and antiquated. Much like the books in his, and our, libraries. This little book is a curiosity, a fun read for lovers of books and libraries.
Deciding that I wanted to use the end of this year to close loops on long-open small projects, I went back to re-start this short book from the beginning. Originally published in 1890, four-time UK Prime Minister William Gladstone (in between his third and fourth terms), it's not what you'd expect a sixty-year politician to write, but it's charming in its reflection of the type of man he was and era from which he came. On the one hand, it's philosophical and written with exquisite knowledge of history; on the other, it ignores the existence of women (as readers and as writers), assumes a commonality of knowledge that was unlikely universally shared at the time and has certainly been forgotten, and is presented with such pinpoint specificity that the kids these days might apply the term "neurospicy" to his approach.
Certainly, the short book does cover "both" topics, books and the necessary issue of housing them. However, his interest in the former is really only in terms of the rapid increase of the number of them so as to create difficulty in finding space to present them in one's personal library.
His first concern is the evident mass increase in the number of books in existence, something that seems quaint now. Turning from the population increase (one should wryly note that the population of the planet was only about 1.5 billion at the time of publication) and the associated fears of food shortages, he quotes the New Testament, "...I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written." Books multiplied faster than people, even 135 years ago.
Gladstone has some poetic things to say about books, such as, The binding of a book is the dress with which it walks out into the world. The paper, type and ink are the body, in which its soul is domiciled. And these three, soul, body, and habilament, are a triad which ought to be adjusted to one another by the laws of harmony and good sense."
The fast increase in books dispensed with, Gladstone acknowledges his chief concern, that it's hard to display and access so many books such as are (or at least, were) available, and there's some discourse as to the Bodleian Library at Oxford. He takes off for some tangential galavanting, such as bemoaning "specialism," or sub-categorization, and urges, with what a modern reader may assume is humor (though I'm not certain), "Let us bow our heads to the inevitable, the day of encylopaedic learning has gone by. It may perhaps be said that that sun set with Leibnitz. But as little learning is only dangerous when it forgets that it is little, so specialism is only dangerous when it forgets that it is special." OK, then!
He continues on, thinking of Cicero and Macaulay, noting that "Books are the voices of the dead. They are a main instrument of communion with the vast human procession of the other world. They are the allies of the thought of man." He speaks of books as the "bonds and rivets of the race, onward from that time when they were first written on the tablets of Babylonia and Assyria..." He contemplates Roman times, when books were copied by enslaved persons to increase the availability, and how the abundance of (quasi) books of that era followed by a "famine of more than a thousand years." He traces libraries of the East and the West, but focuses on English, French, and Italian collections.
Finally, Gladstone reaches his main issue, one third of the way into the book, that "The purchase of a book is commonly supposed to end, even for the most scrupulous customer, with the payment of the bookseller's bill. But this is a mere popular superstition. Such payment is not the last, but the first in terms of a series of goodly length. If we wish to give the block a lease of life equal to that of the pages, the first condition is that it should be bound..." and we are left to realize how naive we are to the ways of the past, to cloth coverings if we cannot afford fancily bound and bejeweled books, and then:
"Well, then, bound or not, the book must of necessity by put into a bookcase. And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, should be catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil! Unless..." and that "unless" imagines the "princely mansions" of his era where "where books, in thousands upon thousands, are jumbled together with no more arrangement than a sack of coals; where not even the sisterhood of consecutive volumes has been respected; where undoubtedly an intending reader may at the mercy of Fortune take something from the shelves that is a book; but where no particular book can except by the purest accident, be found."
As a Certified Professional Organizer, I want to say, Gladstone, man, I feel you!
Gladstone sets a list of questions people have as to what to do about the impending burial under books, and then, "Without answering in detail, I shall assume that the book-buyer is a book-lover, that his love is a tenacious, not a transitory love, and that for him, the question is best how to keep his books." And, indeed, with the remaining two-thirds of this treatise, he skips quickly past the necessity of keeping one's library "sound and dry, the apartment airy, and with abundant light" to focus on three essentials: economy, good arrangement, and accessibility with the smallest possible expenditure of time.
I will leave to the reader to decide whether Gladstone's extensive, precious, exquisite, and supervisory approach to how to build a bookshelf, to what depth a shelf should measure, which books should face where, which sizes of books (octavos vs. quartos vs. folios) should be shelved together, whether one should employ a ladder (nope) or footstool (yep), where placement should acknowledge windows, how smaller shelves can serve as tables, whether the shelving units should be fixed (yes) or mobile (generally, no), and so on.
He even helpfully notes that The cost of the method which I have adopted later in life, and have endeavored to explain, need not exceed one penny per volume." Dude, not even Ikea can match that!
At this point, having exhausted his focus on the hardware (if you'll pardon the modern expression) of housing books, he turns philosophical and speaks of the "society of books" and notes that not all books, just as not all men, are equally sociable and thus do not mix well. He then circles back to "specialism," the collection of large quantities of books, and what to do about "book cemeteries" where so many books exist that the housing of them for personal use exceeds possibility.
For that, he notes that, "Undoubtedly, the idea of book-cemeteries such as I have supposed is very formidable, and that if they must exist, they "must receive as many bodies as possible. The condemned will live ordinarily in pitch darkness, yet so that when wanted, they may be called into the light." And thus Gladstone continues on once more (and into the footnotes) to explain how a "solid mass of books" could be accessed, via weights, pulleys, trams, and so on, in minute detail.
Gladstone's erudition is on display, as is his of-his-time narrow recognition of readers who were (and are) not genteel. His failure to anticipate paperback/softcover books, which would be widely available a mere 25 years hence (popularized for the men in WWI trenches) is understandable; certainly, he could not have imagined the wealth of traditionally and self-published books available every year, let alone formats ranging from ebooks to audiobooks.
Aspects of the concepts Gladstone covers are timely; others are stuffy and antiquated. Much like the books in his, and our, libraries. This little book is a curiosity, a fun read for lovers of books and libraries.
June 5, 2012
Quaint, in its own way. Clearly not entirely applicable today, but informative nonetheless. It made me wonder if Borders bookstores used this as its shelving model. And it makes me curious as to what Gladstone's reaction would be to the robotically-accessed book storage which many university libraries are implementing today, when he had such strong feelings against the rolling stacks!
April 19, 2022
On Books and the Housing of Them, by William Ewert Gladstone (1890, 48pp). Yes, THAT Gladstone — the statesman whose career lasted over 60 years, including 12 years as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, spread over four terms beginning in 1868 and ending in 1894. This delightful volume was penned due to Gladstone’s concern that the earth’s ability to handle the rapid profusion of books was of even greater concern than the increasing numbers of people, which itself was frightening. (Note that this was penned in 1890). The passage of time and the explosive profusion of books to which we are witnesses suggests his early alarm was prescient. Along with climate change, the quantity of books capable of burying mankind must be one of the top terrors of our day. He notes that at the time of his writing all of this, the Bodleian Library [of Oxford] had 20,000 volumes (and I note that the family of Bodleian libraries now has in excess of 13 million books). By way of comparison, the British Library has 150 million volumes, though that is dwarfed by the U.S. Library of Congress’ 164 million. The NY Public Library alone has 55 million books, slightly more than the Library of Canada (54m) and the Russian Library (44m). Almost as an aside to his central theme of housing books, Gladstone pointedly notes that a “little learning is only dangerous when it forgets it is little”, [you surely know some who are not so aware], and “specialism is only dangerous when it forgets that is is special.” Wise words for all of us!! After only a bit of entertaining wandering, the author eventually focuses on how book-lovers can best house their books, explaining cost efficiencies, ideal bookcase sizes and construction, and why such considerations are important, i.e., to avoid cracked floors and bulging walls. Most wonderfully, Gladstone addresses issues with which all of us struggle: dust, fixed vs moveable shelves, categorizations, shelving by size, and more. An original copy of this skim volume was far beyond my ability to afford, but I did find a visually unsatisfying but otherwise enjoyable pdf. You can too.
August 24, 2025
The author is precise and controlling but he sincerely loves books. He seems to view them almost like people and refers to one form of housing them as a "burial". For a short 26 pages, he talks a lot. Unfortunately, I found a good amount of what he said forgettable. Especially since we live in a very different time. Were the libraries of 1890s Britain and United States really that big that this was a necessary essay? I know reading was prominent if you were literate but how many people had substantial libraries to accommodate this? Or is this mainly a problem of the upper classes?
Note that he speaks of the collectors and the writers in the masculine almost exclusively. I'm not judging given his time period, it just threw me off a few times. I don't know what I expected from a Victorian politician. He does expect the reader to have enough space to deal with a lot of shelving, which as a poor apartment dweller, I can tell you is a real problem. Also, an "octavo" that he refers to constantly is a standard sized hardback or paperback book. 3 stars.
Note that he speaks of the collectors and the writers in the masculine almost exclusively. I'm not judging given his time period, it just threw me off a few times. I don't know what I expected from a Victorian politician. He does expect the reader to have enough space to deal with a lot of shelving, which as a poor apartment dweller, I can tell you is a real problem. Also, an "octavo" that he refers to constantly is a standard sized hardback or paperback book. 3 stars.
Read
September 17, 2024"We ought to recollect, with more of a realized conception than we commonly attain to, that a book consists, like a man, from whom it draws it lineage, of a body and a soul."
"But books are the voices of the dead. They are a main instrument of communion with the vast human procession of the other world."
"Well, then, bound or not, the book must of necessity be put into a bookcase. And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, should be cataloged. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil!"
"But under the shadow of this catalog let there be as many living integers as possible, for every well-chosen subdivision is a living integer and makes the library more and more an organism."
"But books are the voices of the dead. They are a main instrument of communion with the vast human procession of the other world."
"Well, then, bound or not, the book must of necessity be put into a bookcase. And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, should be cataloged. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil!"
"But under the shadow of this catalog let there be as many living integers as possible, for every well-chosen subdivision is a living integer and makes the library more and more an organism."
December 7, 2023
Its a bit of a strange irony, reading a concerned essay on the shelf space needed for acceptable library storage, in the form of a pdf on my phone. Perfectly enjoyable though, especially when imagining Gladstone's horror at the complete lack of appropriate binding on these digital books.
January 19, 2020
Housing books?
Advice from an expert, still valid today. The rest of these words are here because Amazon required thirteen of them.
Advice from an expert, still valid today. The rest of these words are here because Amazon required thirteen of them.
December 13, 2012
If you prefer non-electronic books, this little volume will tell you how to get 20,000 volumes into a modest 40x20 room with economy and appeal. But I think Gladstone would be glad to know America saved the English "from being extruded some centuries hence into the surrounding waters" by the sheer mass of their books, by inventing the Kindle. It also means that in our private libraries, at least, we will not have to inter books in compact storage, which "can hardly be contemplated without a shudder at a process so repulsive applied to the best beloved among inanimate objects."
March 8, 2012
Interesting essay on books and personal libraries by the Victorian British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), it’s easy to see that the man loved books. I also find interesting that the issue of copyright was a problem back then, something that still hasn’t been resolved to many people’s opinion a hundred years later. The essay also makes you more appreciative of ebooks, which take up just an atom or twos width.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews