thumb|[[Composite order|Composite columns of a bookshelf from the Bibliothèque Mazarine (Paris)]]
thumb|Household bookshelf arranged by color
A bookcase also called a bookshelf, is a piece of furniture with horizontal shelves, often in a cabinet, used to store books or other printed materials. Bookcases are used in private homes, public and university libraries, offices, schools, and bookstores. Bookcases range from small, low models the height of a table to high models reaching up to ceiling height. Shelves may be fixed or adjustable to different positions in the case. In rooms entirely devoted to the storage of books, such as libraries, they may be permanently fixed to the walls and/or floor.
A bookcase may be fitted with glass doors that can be closed to protect the books from dust or moisture. Bookcase doors are almost always glazed with glass, so as to allow the spines of the books to be read. Especially valuable rare books may be kept in locked cases with wooden or glazed doors. A small bookshelf may also stand on some other piece of furniture, such as a desk or chest. Larger books are more likely to be kept in horizontal piles and very large books flat on wide shelves or on coffee tables.
In Latin and Greek, the idea of bookcase is represented by and (), derivatives of which mean library in many modern languages. A bookcase is also known as a bookshelf, bookstand, cupboard and bookrack. In a library, large bookshelves are called "stacks."
History
East Asia
thumb|Bookcase in the [[Tianyi Chamber, the oldest extant library in China]]
thumb|A 12th-century illustration of a revolving bookcase for Buddhist scriptures as depicted in Li Jie's architectural treatise the [[Yingzao Fashi]]
Revolving bookcases, known as zhuanlunzang (), have been documented in imperial China, and its invention is credited to Fu Xi in 544.
Europe
Private libraries appeared during the late Roman Republic: Seneca inveighed against libraries fitted out for show by illiterate owners who scarcely read their titles in the course of a lifetime, but displayed the scrolls in bookcases (armaria) of citrus wood inlaid with ivory that ran right to the ceiling: "by now, like bathrooms and hot water, a library is got up as standard equipment for a fine house" (domus).
When books were written by hand and were not produced in great quantities, they were kept in small boxes or chests which owners (usually the wealthy aristocrats or clergy) carried with them. As manuscript volumes accumulated in religious houses or in homes of the wealthy, they were stored on shelves or in cupboards. These cupboards are the predecessors of today's bookcases. Later the doors were removed, and the evolution of the bookcase proceeded. Even then, however, the volumes were not arranged in the modern fashion. They were either placed in piles upon their sides, or if upright, were ranged with their backs to the wall and their edges outwards. The band of leather, vellum or parchment which closed the book was often used for the inscription of the title, which was thus on the fore-edge instead of on the spine. Titles were also commonly written onto the fore-edge.
It was not until the invention of printing had greatly reduced the cost of books, thus allowing many more people access to owning books, that it became the practice to write the title on the spine and shelve books with the spine outwards. (This was possible because the books were now in the form of a codex rather than a scroll.) Early bookcases were usually of oak, which is still deemed by some to be the most appropriate wood for an elegant library.
Library shelving
thumb|Parallel arrangement of bookshelves
thumb|Mobile aisle shelving
In the great public libraries of the twentieth century, multilevel stacks often served as both structure and shelving, of iron, as in the British Museum where the shelves are covered with cowhide; or steel, as in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; or of slate, as in the Fitzwilliam Library at Cambridge.
They were, and are, also marketed as "extensible bookcases".
To help retain the books when being carried, a barrister's bookcase has glazed doors. As the shelves must still separate, the usual hinged doors opening sideways cannot be used; instead there is an "up and over" mechanism on each shelf, like an overhead door. The better quality cases use a metal scissor mechanism inside the shelves to ensure that the ends of the doors move in parallel without skewing and jamming. Many of this style, exported worldwide, were made by the Skandia Furniture Co. of Rockford, Illinois around the beginning of the 20th century.
This style of bookcase was either made in the Dickensian period, or harkens back to the style of such times, so they are most commonly glazed with a leaded light and small panes of glass.
Each shelf of a true barrister's bookcase must be portable with a heavy load of books. The more robust examples have folding handles at the ends of each shelf. Modern "decorator" copies of these may look the same, but are often too lightly constructed to be carried whilst loaded, or may even be simply a single fixed case like a normal bookcase, but with separate doors to each shelf to give the appearance of a barrister's bookcase.
Thomas Jefferson's book boxes
Similar to the Barrister's bookcase is Thomas Jefferson's book boxes. When the British burned down the capitol in 1814, Congress went into negotiations with Thomas Jefferson to purchase his personal library of about 6,700 books. The book collection would be the foundation of the Library of Congress, and it had its own specially designed shelves designed to help transport the books with ease from Thomas Jefferson's home at Monticello.
The book boxes or ("book presses" as they are sometimes called) were made of pine with backs and shelves, but no fronts. They were designed to be three-tiered, stacked on top of each other. When fully assembled, the boxes stood about 9 feet high. Each shelf had a different depth, however, ranging from 13 inches to 5.75 inches deep. The shelves had about ¾ inch on the front where boards could be nailed on for transportation. Scrap paper was used to stuff between the books as a way of protecting them during their journey. When it was time to transport the books, the individual shelves could be removed then reassembled once they made it to their final location.
There is no documentation that Thomas Jefferson actually designed them himself, but the amount of detail that went into their construction suggests that they were his idea. There are no surviving original book boxes, but officials at Monticello were able to recreate six of these bookcases in 1959. This was achieved through experts compiling all written evidence of the book boxes as well as taking measurements of the remaining volumes from the Jefferson Library at the Library of Congress.
Writing
;Practical
- The construction and arrangement of bookcases was learnedly discussed in the light of experience by W. E. Gladstone in the Nineteenth Century for March 1890,
- In this passage from Lucy Maud Montgomery's novel Anne of Green Gables, the author refers to a bookcase; "Thomas she had a bookcase in her sitting room with glass doors." referred to a bookcase in her children's tales The Original Peter Rabbit Books in this passage; "The bookcase and the bird-cage refused to go into the mouse-hole."