The fantasy usually goes like this. A friend of mine comes over, and we wander into my shimmering Babylonian spire of a library, with shelves of books ascending into the atmosphere. The only way to access them is by using the star of the show: the book ladder.
No matter what we're discussing, I ceremoniously take it as an opportunity to say, "You know, that reminds me of a passage from ... ," and then I roll the ladder to my desired location, climb up into the heavens, open a book, and nod knowingly. "Yes, this is what I was thinking of." Muttering a line of Donne or Chaucer or Plath, I then descend the ladder, reading in a professorial tone, and eventually hand the book to my friend, as if he asked for it.
This fantasy is not mine alone. The book ladder is the pinnacle of achievement for any aspiring book lover. Gliding along a railing system parallel to the bookcase, it is the finishing touch that completes any library, whether public or personal. Its presence makes tangible an embrace of learning, represented by a wall of needlessly high books anchored by the most specialized of ladders. It signals to guests that you've ostensibly read so many books and acquired so much alleged knowledge that you need extra assistance to get to it.
In Beauty and the Beast, we see Belle, a bookworm whose sophistication seems to make her the precise opposite of her co-star, skating across the floor on a book ladder like it's her dance partner. In Funny Face, the dream becomes a nightmare as Audrey Hepburn gets coldly pushed across the room on her sliding ladder by invading fashion photographers, a superficial bunch who subsequently do the worst thing possible to the owner of a book ladder: rearrange her books. In The Brutalist, Adrien Brody plays an architect who designs perhaps the most minimalist personal library possible, involving a round room lined to the ceiling with retractable doors, and a single postwar chair to admire it all. Yet appraising the precipitous heights of the shelves, one can't help but worry he's forgotten one thing: Where's the book ladder?
"There is -- and has long been -- a physical appeal to being blanketed by books," Evan Friss, author of The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, tells me. "The ladder is a symbol of the scale of the collection, which can be awe-inspiring -- both just to look at aesthetically and to consider how much knowledge is held in those books (some, hopefully, imparted onto the reader)."
Ladders obviously existed long before their literary redesign. They're an ancient tool that's been around for thousands of years across cultures, with perhaps the oldest known example depicted in a 8,000-10,000-year-old Mesolithic rock painting in a cave in Spain. But in that painting, the subject, being a primitive man, is not in search of books, but rather some honey. Similarly, in the Old Testament, Jacob dreamed of a ladder stretching to heaven, but it's not clear that heaven, for him, meant books piled higher than any man could reach on his own.
People wanting to display their books as trophies is nothing new, but it accelerated in the 15 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":
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-18 century, Avril created a ladder that rested on two rails attached to the bookcase and could be moved along the shelves as needed.
Many of the early book ladders were more similar to stepladders, essentially mini wooden staircases that contained ornate hand-carvings on the railings, atop a wide base that could be rolled up to access higher altitudes. While these rolling stepladders are still used, what we know as the library ladder evolved into a regular ladder with wheels that slid along a railing system or had hooks that attached to a bar above the bookcase. You can also see such ladders in mercantiles, clothing stores, wineries, and anywhere that people need things in high places, but it's with books that they hold the most charm.
"You not only have to use your hands to turn the page," Shannon Mattern, a professor of media studies at the University of Pennsylvania who studies how furniture structures our performance of intellectual labor, tells me. "But in this case you have to get down off the ladder, physically slide the thing -- your whole body has to move. It's kind of like a scaling up of the analog engagement with the book." And at a time when so much reading is done digitally, this holds an even more powerful nostalgic appeal.
We tend to see the high shelves and cascading ladder almost as a reflection of what we think our brain looks like, so grandiose that physical contraptions are required to access it all, whereas the rest of humanity is tied to the ground. One wants to float across the room on it, letting our hands drag against the leather-bound hardbacks in a smug orgiastic haze.
For now, unfortunately, most of us are limited to books on shelves that we can too easily reach. So if you've neither the space nor budget to bring a book ladder into your life, there is one other way to magnificently demonstrate the breadth of your supposed reading: the book wheel. Designed by Agostino Ramelli in the 16 century, the giant vertical wheel lets one have multiple books open at a time and read each of them in one spot with ease. It's a bit hard to get your hands on, but unlike the book ladder, you'll only need a few books to justify its presence.