Choosing Shelves for Book Collection

Series Summary

To many avid readers, the book collection is a point of pride, an altar dedicated to their good taste and vast knowledge. Their books become essential parts of their lives, best pals as long as they are reading them and then valued friends who can be relied on for a laugh, a smile or a pat on the back when things get tough. In fact, many bibliophiles consider their precious volumes to be part of their family, to be cared for as much--and in some cases more than--their own flesh and blood. Which is why they will settle for nothing less that the best for their home library.

In this free book collecting video series, you will learn tips for organizing and displaying your precious book collection. Our self-proclaimed bibliophile will offer advice for categorizing your library. By subject? By size? These are both viable options or perhaps you can think of a different way that works better for you. You will also learn tips for lighting your home library as well as where to situate it within your house. Our expert even considers environmental damage to your collection. What precautions should you take in a humid climate to ensure that your books are safe? How can you protect your books in case of an earthquake? She also include suggestions for incorporating book marks and book ends into your collection. You will even learn the right way to keep your books clean. Now that's the complete treatment you've come to expect from Expert Village.

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Jennifer Kimball and one behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you how to organize and maintain your book collection. Before you ever start organizing your books, you need to determine what type of shelving that you want to use to display and organize your books on. There are a couple of different main types that you can go with. You can have single shelves that are just placed on a bracket into the wall. This works great if you have just a couple of dozen books and you want to display them artistically within a room but they don't necessarily all need to be together. You can also build your own bookcases that you get from mass-market stores. You come home and they're in a flat box, you put them together, and you have a nice cheap bookcase, which is going to do well for the short term. You can also have more expensive already built bookcases that are a little bit more steady. You can build your own, or you can also have built ins. Depending on how big your collection is and how long you're going to stay in your home, this will also determine the shelving. If you're still moving around a lot, you're in your 20s, you don't have a whole bunch of books, then I would recommend getting cheaper bookshelves. They might not move as well, but you're also not investing a whole lot of money in them. If you're in your home and you're going to stay here for at least 10 years and your book collection continuously grows, I would highly recommend getting built-in bookcases. This is going to be great in filling your needs exactly because you can determine how big and how much space you want to take up. It's going to fit well for your books. You can determine the shelf sizes. If you have lots of hardbacks or lots of paperbacks, you can have it designed specifically to fit your collection, and it's also going to be the one that's going to last the longest. Depending on how many books you have and where you are in your life and your budget, all of these are going to determine the types of shelving you're going to have for your book collection."