Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Every shelf is different and every bookshelf tells a different story. One bookshelf can creak with character in a bohemian coffee shop and another can groan with gravitas in the Library of Congress. Writer and historian Lydia Pyne finds bookshelves to be holders not just of books but of so many other things: values, vibes, and verbs that can be contained and displayed in the buildings and rooms of contemporary human existence. With a shrewd eye toward this particular moment in the history of books, Pyne takes the reader on a tour of the bookshelf that leads critically to this juncture: amid rumors of the death of book culture, why is the life of the bookshelf in full bloom?
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Lydia Pyne is a writer and historian, interested in the history of science and material culture. She has degrees in history and anthropology and a PhD in history and philosophy of science from Arizona State University, and is currently a visiting researcher at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her field and archival work has ranged from South Africa, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, and Iran, as well as the American Southwest.
Lydia's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, History Today, Time, The Scientist, Nautilus, The Appendix, Lady Science and Electric Literature as well as The Public Domain Review, and her previous book was Seven Skeletons, the story of human origins. She lives in Austin, Texas, where she is an avid rock climber and mountain biker.
Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Director of Film & Media Studies, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. Bogost is author or co-author of ten books, including
Alien Phenomenology (2012)and Play Anything (2016).
Christopher Schaberg is Director of the Program in Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and the author of
The Textual Life of Airports (2012),
The End of Airports (2015),
Airportness (2017),
The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018),
Searching for the Anthropocene (2019),
Pedagogy of the Depressed (2021), and
Adventure: An Argument for Limits (2023), all published by Bloomsbury. He is also the founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons book series.
