If you liked this article, Henry Petroski's "The Book on the Bookshelf" is worth reading. He goes into great detail about the history, explaining why books were usually chained to their shelves, etc.

If you don't know the author, his most famous is probably "To Engineer is Human: the Role of Failure in Successful Design". I liked "The Evolution of Useful Things", because now I realize Americans use their forks wrong. The design of the fork follows function, and that curve is there for a reason.