Desktop book carousels look great but Capitano Agostino Ramelli's book wheel is a tour de force! These are still useful for heavy book such as unabridged dictionaries, the use of which has declined massively but are a joy to consult, with additional information you cannot find online (unless you subscribe to OED). I've always wanted one of these.
Looking somewhat later, I find it interesting that "bookcase" and "bookshelf" become prevalent in Google's Ngram Viewer only comparatively late in the 20th century. "Bookcase" starts its ascent around 1900 and peaks in the 1930s, "bookshelf" really doesn't become particularly prevalent until after 1980.
I've heard of "bull in a china shop", but "ox in a library" is even worse! And a *flying* ox with wings at that!—so it can reach the top shelves, too, I guess.
Wikipedia tells me a winged ox is old religious iconography associated with Saint Luke [0], which explains why they've inserted it into multiple paintings in otherwise-nonsensical contexts. (Wikipedia also has one additional painting of this ox ("Hermen Rode (1484)")—this one is actually standing on a bookshelf, why not).
Once you learn the iconography it's hard to unsee when you look at almost any piece of art from that period. John has the eagle, Mark the lion, Matthew the angel. That's why St Marks square in Venice has a lion, for example.
Since we are talking nonsensical images with books, heres one of the eagle of St. John settling down for a nice read.
If you liked this article, Henry Petroski's "The Book on the Bookshelf" is worth reading. He goes into great detail about the history, explaining why books were usually chained to their shelves, etc.
If you don't know the author, his most famous is probably "To Engineer is Human: the Role of Failure in Successful Design". I liked "The Evolution of Useful Things", because now I realize Americans use their forks wrong. The design of the fork follows function, and that curve is there for a reason.
Why do old illustrations so often seem to have distorted perspective. It's like artists at the time didn't understand it, but I can't believe that's the case?
The most inutitive purpose of illustration is to communicate some sense or idea, or perhaps a set of facts, or occassionally to express some bold aesthetic style.
Those purposes aren't obviously served by rendering the exact detail of a 2D projection with accurate scale and perspective. Doing so can be an impressive technical feat, or a prevailing style (as it became for a while), but can also be seen as a somewhat stubborn rejection of visual language and editorial expression.
Techniques for realism and perspective are evidenced throughout history, but even now you can see it rejected in plenty of both commercial and fine art because it's just not that important/relevant most of the time.
In some artistic traditions, visual style has been "conceptual" rather than "perceptual", meaning that objects are presented to emphasize their meaning rather than how they might naturally look in a scene. The two such artistic cultures you are most likely familiar with would be Medieval Europe and Ancient Egypt.
Information below is about the system used in Library of Alexandria but other libraries of that time, e.g. the one in Pergamum, was probably organized similarly: Each roll had a tab on the end (the circular end of the scroll) that gave the author's name and some other information, but often no title. Problem was that many rolls contained more than one work and many works took many rolls. Famous librarians have invented techniques to make the job of finding a work easier, since there were 490,000 rolls in the main library! The main library was reserved for the scholars of the Museum, while its sister library, with about 43k books, was open for public use.
Zenodotus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenodotus) the Library's first director, invented alphabetical order as a mode of organization. Rolls were also arranged in different rooms, by topic, e.g. poetry, history. Another important device was bibliographic work, such as the Pinakes (Tables) of Callimachus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinakes), which filled no less than 120 books (it has not survived but was widely quoted).
If you want to delve deeper, Libraries in the Ancient World by Lionel Casson, from which I took the informatio above, is a very informative and readable book. It even has the only known depiction of how the rolls were arranged on shelves.*
Scrolls were stacked horizontally on a shelf or stored upright in a cylindrical book-box (capsa), which was fitted with a lid and straps for carrying (the scrinium was a larger container). According to Pliny, the only wood suitable for such capsae was beech, which could be thinly-cut (XVI.lxxxiii.229). If particularly valuable, rolls might be wrapped in a protective sleeve and tied with thongs....
That sounded farfetched to me so I looked up the Codex Amiatinus mentioned in TFA and wow, it really is that big: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Codex_Am...