BOOKCASE, a piece of furniture, forming a shelved recep tacle for the storage of books.
Books written by hand were kept in small coffers which the great carried about with them on their journeys. As manuscript volumes accumulated in the religious houses or in regal palaces they were stored upon shelves or in cupboards, and it is from these cupboards that the bookcase of to-day directly descends. At a somewhat later date the doors were discarded, and the evolution of the bookcase made one step forward. Even then, however, the volumes were not arranged in the modern fashion. They were , either stacked in piles upon their sides or placed upright 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 back. It was not until the invention of printing had greatly cheapened books that it became the practice to write the title on the back and place the edges inwards. Early bookcases were usually of oak. (See BOOK.) The oldest bookcases in England are those in the Bodleian library at Oxford, which were placed in position in the last year or two of the i 6th century; in that library are the earliest extant examples of shelved galleries over the flat wall-cases. Long ranges of book-shelves are necessarily somewhat severe in appearance, and many attempts have been made by means of carved cornices and pilasters to give them a more graceful appearance—attempts which were never so success ful as in the hands of the great English cabinet-makers of the second half of the 18th century.
Both Chippendale and Sheraton made or designed great num bers of bookcases, mostly glazed with little lozenges encased in fret-work frames often of great charm and elegance. The French cabinet-makers of the same period were also highly successful with small ornamental cases. Mahogany, rose-wood, satin-wood and even choicer exotic timbers were used ; they were often inlaid with marqueterie and mounted with chased and gilded bronze. Dwarf bookcases were frequently finished with a slab of choice marble at the top. In the great public libraries of the 20th cen tury the bookcases are often of iron, as in the British Museum where the shelves are covered with cowhide, of steel, as in the library of Congress at Washington, or of slate, as in the Fitz william library at Cambridge.