Many people want to know the best way to store their books, especially older books. People wonder about storing books on the spine, ” how should I store books?” should I shelve them vertically or horizontally stacked? is stacking books bad, storing books on their side? Does stacking books on top of each other damage them? What about storing books on the spine, or on the edge spine up? Okay, well here’s the 411, let’s say.
I’m not going to get into stuff like temperature, humidity, and other issues – just the matter of how to physically arrange books on their shelves to avoid damage and make it easier to access them and organize. There’s a lot of emotive information on-line on whether to shelve books upright, vertically, traditionally or horizontally. Very little about storing them spine down, or spine up. If you search Google (or DuckDuckGo) you’ll find all sorts of opinions, including for example one Redditor’s an exclamation who, on seeing bookshelves with books stacked in TV, films and magazines, could only say “these are not readers.” Really? Perhaps Erasmus wasn’t a reader. Stacking books was a custom in his age. The Library of Congress has some advice though, for it is an imminent source for readers and collectors alike.
Along with important advice on proper book care, with such mundanities such as dusting them and keeping them dry, the Library of Congress recommends;
“Shelving books of similar size together, so that the face of the covers are maximally supported by the neighbors on each side
Keeping upright shelved books straight and not leaning (storing books lying flat is also good)”
Therefore, according to them, storing books flat, horizontally, is fine just as keeping them upright and not leaning. This is the Library of Congress itself, it’s about as official as you’ll get. Though if I overcome my laziness and inertia I might bother to Google (or websearch in DuckDuckGo) around and see what the British Library has to say, if anything. However this doesn’t explicitly address stacking, just laying single volumes flat.
Let’s look at it historically and anthropologically; Something interesting thing is that storing books upright on shelves is a recent Western European custom. It wasn’t done in the Oriental world even through modernity. But in the Western world it’s a post-medieval Custom, whose history I’ll discuss another time. If you go to the ancient manuscript library in the Dar Uloom Deoband you’ll find, even in the 21st century, priceless volumes over a thousand years old stacked horizontally. From Palestine to Persia, from Algier to Arabia, from Tashkent to India to China, in all of these cultures with deep literary traditions in most cases books in the form we know, that is codices, were generally stored stacked upon each other, up to the 20th century and in some cases through the 20th to the 21st, though the custom of shelving books upright is increasing with increased Western cultural influence.
In the Anglo-American world many book enthusiasts and collectors generally frown on stacking. I question this, however. And have found some librarians see no problem with it. For them, stacking upright eases patron access. But many librarians seem to see no inherent problem to stacking stacking books per se. It’s just difficult to pulling a book out of a thick pile of horizontally stacked books. It becomes a bit like a stack retrieval process in computer science…
One very real possible drawback to stacking books however is dust cover damage. Stacking heavy books can, indeed, cause scratches to the dust covers. This is only relevant to books with dust covers, and more to the point books that do have dust covers without Mylar – or other types of protective membrane – wrappings added.
If you have a valuable book with a valuable dust cover it goes without saying that you should wrap it in Mylar. It’s like a condom for books. Mylar wrapping extends the pleasure of having the book while lessening the chance of contracting a pathology.
Even book enthusiasts and experts who frown on stacking seem to generally admit it’s okay, unless the books are collectible. But you should lay the widest books – in terms of width of cover, not thickness, on the bottom, and the narrowest books at the top. Which should be common sense, but perhaps isn’t. Also, balance is important, any books that don’t lie completely flat, for example warped books, should be laid at the very top.
The one thing one should never do is to shelve books on their opening edge, with their spines up. In a word; Fore-edge shelving. One has to ask why anyone would do this, but apparently people do. In fact some public libraries do, but generally not books of much value. Such as children’s books. Storing books on their edges, spines up, is probably done to easily see the titles looking down. It is also done, it seems, by some people – even librarians or bookshop clerks – when a book is too tall to fit a given shelf’s space.
Fore edge shelving is, in general, a bad thing to do. Storing books on their fore-edges damages them faster, and causes the bindings to eventually fail and the book to fall apart. This is no mere internet rumor or old wives’ tale, though it’s to be said that sometimes, often even, wives’ tales tend to be remarkably accurate, far more so than we men have been prone to give credence to over the ages. To the general misfortune of many men through the ages who,seemingly sensibly, decided to ignore their wives’ tales and found themselves in veritable messes. Cassandra was, it seems, an archetype of sorts.
Books stored on their fore-edges will suffer gravity’s effects from the block of pages – what’s called the text block – being pulled down and gradually separating from the spine, and the pressure on the text block causes damage also to the binding materials connected to the cover boards. What’s happening is that you effectively suspend the book’s entire weight from its joints. The result is the text block is pulled out of its cover. The text block will just fall out from its covers, and that little bit of construction paper connecting it to its bindings isn’t going to save it one iota. This happens even if they are stored tightly.
So, the spines become damaged, the joints and then binding itself becomes damaged, the whole book breaks down faster. The book starts falling apart at the cover.
If you’ve seen a book with floppy covers with the text block just sort of freely swinging and feeling as if it’s tenuously connected by a mere sheet of paper or thread, then this is what’s happening. Someone committed arrant acts of muppetry on your book in its past, and left you with an unfortunately gimpy book. Pity the thing, while mumbling execrations and imprecations on the person who damaged the poor thing. “But I didn’t know?” Well now you do. May many a book’s life be spared from this point on.
If a book is too tall to fit in a general shelf the advice on trade blogs seems to be to store them fore-edge up, spine down. Basically resting on their spine. This is also, it should be noted, not the best of things to do. Spine down will eventually cause spine damage but nowhere near as quickly as spine up.
So, if summary, if you want to destroy your books faster then store them on their fore-edges, spine facing up. It’s a terrific way, apparently, to just wreck them. However storing them flat and stacked is probably fine, people have been doing this for 2000 years or so in Asia, and the custom of storing them upright is just a contemporary Western habit. One whose popularity is somewhat recent, for earlier in Western history they were also often stacked flat on book shelves. Stacking them is fine, just consider book geometry, gravity, and have some sense about it.
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