People wanting to display their books as trophies is nothing new, but it accelerated in the 15th century, when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Over the next few hundred years, the number of books that were printed underwent exponential growth—as did the yearning to show them off.
During the Victorian era, personal libraries became more robust, as wealthy people sought books with luxury bindings that looked great on shelves. Consider a scene in The Great Gatsby in which the character Owl Eyes marvels at Gatsby’s too-perfect-looking study. “Absolutely real—have pages and everything,” he says. “I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard.” It wasn’t just Owl Eyes who had cottoned on to the scheme. In The Bookshop, Friss recounts a journalist in the 1920s who offered best practices regarding “domestic bookaflage”:
You can group a few high-brow books at a strategic point so that as the guest enters his eye will fall upon them at once and he will whisper to himself: “Ah! At last I am entering the home of a cultivated American!” You don’t have to read them. You are safe. Nobody any more talks about the books they have read.
For ages such books were kept within human grasp, and only required the occasional stepping stool to pluck out the higher editions. But as the books continued to stack up, it became inevitable that some enterprising carpenter would propose a means for stacking them even higher. Enter Benjamin Franklin. He didn’t invent the book ladder, mainly because he didn’t think old men should be using ladders to grab books. (“Old men find it inconvenient to mount a ladder or steps for that purpose, their heads being sometimes subject to giddinesses,” he wrote.) So Franklin, an avid reader who was in many ways the original self-made man, conceived a contraption called the Long Arm, which involved a stick of pine with a sort of loop attached, allowing readers to lasso an out-of-reach book.
It’s less clear who invented the book ladder, likely because using a ladder to reach high-up books is probably an idea that many libraries and collectors arrived at on their own. If there’s a ladder in the vicinity, and you lean it against a bookcase to grab a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, that’s now a de facto book ladder. Still, according to America’s oldest rolling-ladder maker, the century-old Putnam Rolling Ladders, whose customers have included George W. Bush, credit for the first dedicated book ladder goes to a French furniture designer named Étienne Avril. In the mid-18th century, Avril created a ladder that rested on two rails attached to the bookcase and could be moved along the shelves as needed.