Reshelving books in a consistently wrong place.

[Mental_Mouse]

So, first thread from the used-book store I work at. Now, there are a few customers who will carry books around and reshelve them at random locations in the store -- we call those "gremlins" when we're being polite. But that's not a brain burp, just ordinary suckiness.

The brain burp is when, in an alphabetized section, they apparently tried to put the book back where it came from, but they placed it one shelf below (or rarely above) where it belonged... but, it's at at the right horizontal location! That is, it should have gone almost exactly above (or below) where they put it. This happens surprisingly often.

I didn't understand this at all, until one day I was reshelving books while exhausted, and caught myself before I did it! And no, it wasn't me all along -- I'm looking at the adjacent books to find the place, which was in fact how I caught myself.

[KellyHabersham]

I think it's even worse when the customer re-shelves the book with the pages facing out.......I've heard from people on here that books were shelved that way once, but it just makes extra work for the "shelving staff" at the library when customers do this.

[Mental_Mouse]

I think it's even worse when the customer re-shelves the book with the pages facing out.......I've heard from people on here that books were shelved that way once, but it just makes extra work for the "shelving staff" at the library when customers do this.

Well, at least that's obvious -- you can look down the shelf and immediately see any books with the outer edge showing. For simple misfiling, I have to check the titles and verify their order. It also means a customer (or me) can't find the book by name. Even in non-alphabetized sections, I am very good at scanning the shelves to find a book for a customer, but I can't find it if it's AWOL! If it's off in another section, we might almost as well not have it, until I or someone checks the target shelf and rescues the wanderer.

[wolfie]

I think it's even worse when the customer re-shelves the book with the pages facing out.......I've heard from people on here that books were shelved that way once

Yep, books used to be shelved spine-inward. It helped to keep the chains organized. Yes, chains - this was done in the era before the printing press, when books were copied out by hand. It could take a year of a monk's (literacy was pretty much confined to the Church in Europe) time to copy a book, so books were extremely valuable.