Ok this is a different topic I know haha but it's something I've been wondering about.

I'm fortunate enough to have a decent collection of books. Most of them are hardback movie tie in books and the others are general art books or photography books. They're all pretty big.

Now I usually have them standing vertically, however I've noticed that on a few of the books the pages themselves have begun to sag down and pull away from the binding slightly. I panicked and decided to stack them horizontally. Now this has messed up the way I had them indexed but tbh if it's going to protect them more I'd rather just live with it.

I took into consideration the size and weight so the biggest and (usually) the heaviest go to the bottom.

What do you guys think? I've heard conflicting reports on whether this is good or not for books. How do you guys display your books?

I'm actually pre-ordering an expensive photography book that will be too large for my shelves and my plan for that is to have it lying down flat protected by an acrylic case for when it's not being read. I love my books so want to look after them for as long as I can.

I have a few other oversized books that can't fit in with my shelf space, so I slide those in with the spines up. Because the pages in those books are heavier my fear with them is that they'll come away from the binding even quicker. So I need to come with a plan for those.

Store the really large/oversize "coffee table" type books flat, but don't stack them more than two or three high , depending on how heavy they are.


https://www.lrs.org/documents/field_sta ... torage.pdf

https://www.librarything.com/topic/133886

https://www.reddit.com/r/BookCollecting ... anding_up/

Thanks Deimos

I saw the Reddit thread or at least another one and there was quite a bit of bickering about what was right and wrong haha.

I have stacked too many so I'll have to rearrange them so that they're not too much. I'm gonna run out of shelf space quicker than I thought

I was always on the fence about the same thing ---upright or flat-- and for the same reason...space considerations.

Then I noticed the "sagging spine'' on one or two older oversized books that I had picked up second-hand and deduced it had to be from standing them upright; caused either by the previous owner or myself, or maybe both of us.
So I started laying them flat. I only have a half dozen or so books like that so not too much space is lost.