Upright Works: The Emergence of the Verticle Library in the Sixteenth Century

The invention of printing dramatically increased the supply of books and reduced their cost leading to the creation of large libraries. To manage this larger body of information methods of physically organizing books changed significantly. Books began to be stored side by side vertically along shelves instead of horizontally or frontally on various furnishings. This phenomenon began in private libraries early in the sixteenth century and for institutional libraries after 1560. It may have originated in Germany as early images portraying various forms of vertical libraries first appear from 1508 to 1531 in German woodcuts. However, an essential feature of many vertical libraries first occurred in Rome during the mid-1520s, namely the inclusion of a spine title as an integral part of a binding''s design. This was an innovation of Roman humanists who, more than simply responding to practical issues of book location and retrieval, may have desired to replicate an aspect of ancient libraries, consistent with their interest in reviving antiquity in daily life. The Venetian publisher Paolo Manuzio, evidently motivated by the same impulse, developed in 1540 an alternative form of binding intended for vertical storage with fore-edges outward. By the late 1530s Ferdinand Columbus chose to organize vertically his library at Seville largely in response to its large holdings of over 12,000 volumes, and Francis I arranged vertically a section of his personal library, consisting of books printed in Italy and bound to an innovative design with spine titles, probably to emulate developments in Italy.
The first five chapters examine storage methods of libraries preceding the change as well as early libraries which adopted vertical storage up to about 1540, a date by when all possible solutions for vertical side by side storage had been devised. The final three chapters trace the spread of vertical libraries and conversion to vertical storage in libraries originally designed to use other forms of storage. As no fifteenth or sixteenth century private libraries survive with furnishings and books intact, the methodology is largely based on less direct evidence, including typology, iconography, descriptive accounts, inventories, catalogues, and bindings.