Yesterday I decided to take a day off from BCR, sleep in, get some stuff done around the house, have lunch with my SO, then head over to the Friends bookstore (which I manage for those of you who don’t already know that) and shelve the new paperback Science Fiction and Fantasy books. Instead, I got a call at 8:55am from the board president saying that there was a problem at the store with the new shelving and that I needed to come over right away. What I arrived to find is pictured here.
It seems that we weren’t very smart about filling our new 7′ double-sided shelving unit. The thing is stable enough assuming you balance the load. We, on the other hand, put too many books on the one side and not enough on the other. Overnight gravity decided to raise its ugly head. Luckily, since it did happen over night, no one was around to be underneath the resulting pile.
All of the shelves survived, but the eight of the end pieces that hold the shelves to the uprights will need to be replaced. (A few close-ups of the damage can be found in my flickr account. Just click on the photo in this post.)
Should we have added additional anchors to the shelving? Of course. We’ve got more shelving on the way and we’ve already talked to the plaza’s maintenance guy. He’s got a plan to run beams from the shelving to the walls to give us the needed stability. Still, we’ll not put as many books on the shelves as we have previously.
As far as I could tell, we only had to get rid of one book due to damage from the collapse, and that was a book that wasn’t in very good shape to begin with.
Almost like the TV commercial where a person shelving books lsets go of the book truck and it knocks down a whole range of shelves. I am glad no one was hurt.