I've got too many books on the bookcases around the house, and got a shed last year, so at some point figured it would be better to store some of them in the shed. Just putting them in a pile ontop of each other wasn't working as I couldn't then get to stuff, so thought I'd get some spare cardboard fruit boxes from the supermarket, and could then put the books with their spines readable so could just take out a box and see what was in it and get to them easily. Filled several of the boxes so they stacked ontop of each other as no room for them any other way, it's a small shed.
Today when tidying up the shed, I've needed to get a few books out the boxes, and realized that was a terrible idea to store them like that. The ones near the top of the stack in the upper boxes are pretty fine, but lower down, many of them are now skewed badly and pretty much ruined. Seems the books not being entirely secured or flat on top meant the weight pushing down on them caused them to bend sideways, so they're now heavily creased. I expect them being in cardboard boxes made it worse as obviously that can then bend too rather than if it had been plastic or whatever it might ahve kept them upright and prevented it somewhat. Happened with both the softbacks and hardbacks.
Here's an example from lower down, it's a hardback: https://i.imgur.com/Quk0D6t.jpeg
And what most of the paperbacks are now like, some a lot worse than these: https://i.imgur.com/tIa1SP8.jpeg
Have moved some into the house and put them laying down ontop of each other to see if that helps, but I don't know if it will:
https://i.imgur.com/nPSN6YJ.jpeg
https://i.imgur.com/1f00Pnc.jpeg
I expect the paperbacks wavy-ness might be fixable if they stay weighted down for a few days, but it's the now angled spines I don't know about, especially with the hardbacks .
Obviously this is pretty upsetting to have it happen to so many of my books. To make it worse, I can't even think of a better way to actually store them in the limited space I have. They won't fit in the shed if i played them horizontally instead.
by TheVoidDragon