If you’ve decided to declutter your book collection, you don’t have to limit yourself to an arbitrary number of titles, like Marie Kondo’s slim, 30-book collection.Keep your piles upon piles ...

But before book, there were scrolls, and that’s where Mari’s story starts. As it turns out, for a great deal of their history, shelves were much more haphazard than they are today.

Alex Johnson is part of the online team at Britain's Independent newspaper, and a few years ago he started a blog, Bookshelf, devoted entirely to how we store our books. "This was an early moment ...