How to Light Your Book Collection

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. Now that you have your library all setup and organized, there are various different considerations that you have to take into account. One of these is light. If you have a window that's placed in an odd spot like really up high or down low and kind of gets in the way of your bookcase, you still want to make sure that your bookcases are not covering up the window. You want to make sure if you have some higher windows that you measure the distance between the bottom of the windowsill and the floor before you go and purchase your bookcases. You don't want to cover it up for a number of reasons. First of all, having the light is quite nice. It allows you to see into the room and keeps the room a lot brighter. Libraries can have a tendency to be a lot darker with all the books in them. Another reason is if you cover up a window with a bookcase, then all of that sunlight is going to be concentrated on the books. Particularly, if you don't have a back to your bookcase, even if you do, it's still going to dry out your books and can really damage books a lot. The paper will get dry and crinkly. If you have a collection of first editions or other valuable books, this is something you really want to be careful about. Another thing is overhead lighting or artificial light. You want to make sure that you have enough light in your library to be able to read what is on your bookshelves just to be able to see it so you know what book you're pulling off of the shelf is important. You can either have good overhead lighting or you can also purchase small lights that go on the inside of your bookcase to illuminate each shelf. Either way, you want to make sure that your library is a bright and cheerful place to encourage reading and to be able to find what you're looking for."