Aside from helping you declutter your home, properly storing your books will safeguard their covers and pages from damage.
Books can be passed down through families and become treasured keepsakes full of memories. No book, no matter how rare, should be neglected because of its lack of uniqueness. Books can be delicate, so it’s important to store them properly to avoid damage to the covers and pages and to help you declutter your home.
Choose Higher-Quality Seating
Maybe the furnishings in the room aren’t the first thing you think of when you think of safeguarding your book collection. Although it’s a natural assumption to make, the belief that hardwood bookcases and shelves will protect your books is greatly exaggerated.
Books on your shelf may be damaged by the acid in wood, which can eat through the covers, spines, and pages. Whenever possible, try to avoid using wood, but if you must, make sure to choose the best possible wood. In this case, you’ll want to seek out a wood variety with lower acidity levels. That means you should never again use oak in any way, shape, or form.
Protect the Paper Trail
You’ve been entrusted with improving the organization of the books. Keeping a close check on the relative humidity of the place in which you store all of your books is an essential part of this procedure, especially if you intend to hide them away from public view until you decide to revisit them. Foxing, unattractive blotches, and patches that reveal the book’s age can appear if the humidity is too high (more than 35%).
Newer works rarely face this problem, but classics from the 18th and 19th centuries, in particular, can become dated quite quickly. Books should be kept out of the light and in a cool, dark place. Intense exposure to sunlight, especially UV radiation, can degrade the condition of the dust jacket protecting your book.
Seek More Information Regarding Maintenance
Seek out books of similar dimensions and place them in the same shelf location. They can lean on one another for support, which in turn helps other books nearby stay standing. The binding of the books can be damaged further if they are leaned against one another. If you’re dealing with heavy volumes, it’s imperative that you always use bookends and stack the books horizontally.
The owner of a book feels a special connection to that book, and as a result, they will go to great lengths to ensure that it remains in the same pristine condition in which it was received.
