Stand in front of any bookcase and you're looking at a wall of spines — a couple of centimetres each, carrying a title, an author, a publisher's mark, and a surprising amount of personality. It feels like the obvious way to keep books. For most of their history, though, nobody saw the spine at all.
Backwards on the shelf
In medieval and early Renaissance libraries, books were valuable enough to be chained down, and the chain was fixed to the cover or the front edge of the boards rather than the spine. That meant shelving them the other way round: fore-edge out, spine to the wall, so a reader could lift a book down and open it without twisting the chain into knots. Hereford Cathedral's chained library, set up in 1611, is the only one to survive with all its chains, rods, and locks still intact, and it's the best place to see what a backwards library actually looks like.
With the spine hidden, the identifying happened on the page edges instead. Trinity College Dublin's earliest books had their shelf-marks written on their fore-edges. The Venetian lawyer Odorico Pillone went further, and in the late sixteenth century had Cesare Vecellio — Titian's cousin — paint little scenes on the fore-edges of his books, so each shelf became a row of tiny pictures hinting at what was inside.
Turning the book around
Lettering started appearing on spines in the early 1500s, but it took another century for the habit to stick. By the early 1600s, growing collections made chains impractical, books moved from lying flat to standing upright, and the spine slowly turned to face the room. Once it did, it needed to say something. Binders began tooling titles in gold onto leather, or adding a small leather label, and booksellers soon realised that a lettered spine was a way to get noticed from across the shop.
Cloth, gold, and the publisher's spine
Until the 1820s most books were sold in temporary paper boards, and the owner paid a binder to dress them properly. In 1820–21 the London publisher William Pickering began issuing his Diamond Classics in coloured cloth, each with a small printed paper label on the spine giving the title and the price. Then in 1832 the binder Archibald Leighton worked out how to stamp gold directly into cloth, first used across John Murray's seventeen-volume works of Byron. From that point every copy of a book could arrive on the shelf dressed identically, and the spine stopped belonging to the owner's binder and started belonging to the publisher. Victorian publishers made the most of it, with decorated cloth spines that worked as a sort of advert on the shelf.
Which way up?
Then there's the question every book designer still argues about: which way should the title run? In Britain, the US, and Scandinavia, titles usually read top to bottom, so you tilt your head to the right. Across most of continental Europe they read bottom to top. For a while British books went either way, and plenty of early paperbacks ran upwards, but top-to-bottom eventually won out here and was written into an international standard, ISO 6357, in 1985 (with a British equivalent, BS 6738). The reasoning is pleasingly practical: lay a book face up on a table and a top-to-bottom title reads the right way round. It's still not universal, which is why a mixed shelf of English and German paperbacks will always have you tilting your head both ways.
We tilt our heads to the right without thinking about it now, which probably says more about how many spines we've drawn than anything else. Our book and reading prints are mostly rows of them, if you fancy a shelf that'll never need dusting.
