An imaginative, well-illustrated history of the storing of books, The Book on the Bookshelf includes a description of the design and "invention" of the Library of Congress's bookstacks by civil engineer Bernard R. Green (1843-1914). The Library's Collections Management Division, cosponsor of Mr. Petroski's talk, will offer tours of the Library's stacks immediately following the program. A professor of civil engineering and history at Duke University, Henry Petroski is the author of the highly acclaimed The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (Knopf, 1990), The Evolution of Useful Things (Knopf, 1992), and five other books. In its praise of The Book on the Bookshelf, the Christian Science Monitor said that the book's charm "lies in the way that it helps us to take a fresh look at an old, long-familiar object, seeing it, as did its various inventors and innovators, for the first time."
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