So, you’ve got a lot of books and it’s moving time. You’ve feared this day for at least the last six months. What types of boxes work best? Any tips for protecting them during the move? If you need to store your books for a while before you’ll get to set them all up again, what are some things to keep in mind to protect them?
What have been your experiences moving books? How many times have you had to move them? How many boxes have you used? Horror stories? Do tell!
I’ve always been more concerned about moving my fish tanks, but I’ve recently learned a lesson about storing books in cardboard boxes.
We moved into our current house about 7 years ago, and I still have many boxes of books sitting on our basement floor. A year or two ago, after we had received a lot rain, I noticed that a portion of the floor was wet. We make sure our food storage is not directly on the floor, and my more valuable books happened to be in boxes that were sitting on something else – whether on purpose or coincidence I don’t remember – but I had a few boxes of books that were soaked.
I am now storing things in plastic totes. They’re probably not “archival” quality, but I’m hoping it won’t be longterm storage and that I will someday have more shelf space. But in the meantime at least they won’t get wet.
Yikes, good thing nothing too valuable got wet. Plastic are probably more sturdy and definitely safer from water, and stackable. Could be a bit more expensive than say, banker boxes, but I suppose if you didn’t need a whole lot of them, that could be a good short term solution.
I wonder if plastic would pose any issue with ventilation or condensation in a humid environment.
The lids snap on and tend to stay on, but hopefully they don’t seal tight enough for humidity to be a problem. And I got lucky – my local Walmart just happened to be having a clearance sale on these large black totes. I think they were about $1 each. I bought every one they had.
A suitable guillotine paper cutter (to de-spine), a moderate to high-paced scanner with the software to render the text and pictures into pdfs and other suitable formats for e-reading. I recommend keeping originals, rubber banded together and stacked in as many plastic storage bins as it takes, which can then be stacked and stored somewhere (a relative’s/friend’s shed, basement, etc., a rental storage closet, or some similar arrangement).
Bankers Boxes from Costco. They sell them in packages of 10, which makes them a very good value.
I’m at over 100 boxes now. They’ve been kept in a cool and dry location — including old house, temperature controlled storage, and new house.
I guess that makes two moves.
It’s been over 2 years now, but everything looks great.
The bookshelves are finally going up this week, so I’ll be saying goodbye to the boxes very soon!
As to Wreddyornot’s suggestion – I have a different use for the guillotine. To anyone who proposed to de-spine a book just to scan it, I’d dull the blade, smear it with rat feces, and then chop the perpetrators fingers off one at a time very slowly after plucking their finger nails and holding their eyelids open with dirty fish hooks. I might also find new uses for my book press with sundry parts of the perpetrators anatomy. Other than that, good idea.
Moving and storage may be two different issues. When we moved from California about three years ago, I went down to a storage place and bought boxes they called “Books and Records” boxes. They were about 13″x13″x17″ and weighed about 40 pounds when filled with books. Sturdier than banker boxes so I didn’t have to worry about them bursting during the move. I did wrap my more fragile books and some where I was worried about scuffing. Moving & storage places will sell a box of wrapping paper (usually used for kitchen stuff) very inexpensively.
As soon as we got here, I bought some inexpensive shelves for the basement and got the books out of the boxes and onto shelves where they remained until I got my library built.
If we were going to just store books, I think the Banker Boxes Cris mentioned would work fine assuming a dry, cool environment.
So far this thread has been about packing & storage but I found a bigger headache was getting the plethora of books into some kind of order when unpacking. In retrospect, I wish I had labeled the boxes by the category of books inside them. Would have made things much easier when unpacking and putting them on the shelves.
Using boxes of uniform size, rather than whatever you find haphazardly at the grocery store, is a real convenience if you’re packing the truck yourself or if you have to store books for any length of time.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to unpack all my books after my last move so I kept a more detailed inventory than I might have otherwise. I numbered the boxes, writing (1) or (2) or whatever on all six sides so that when they were stacked I wouldn’t have shift boxes around to spot the number. My inventory was kept on paper rather than by writing on the sides of the boxes. It’s still not easy to get into the stored boxes but knowing that I only have to watch for the number (18) on the side of a carton makes it easier than trying to read upside-down words or turning a carton every which way to find the side I labeled.
Wreddyornot, holy crap! You ought to be BANNED from this blog!
Cris, good luck setting up the shelves. That’s exciting!
Keith, thanks for those suggestions. I agree about the headache of putting the books in order. I’ll probably put up a post about that later on. But one good thing, it’s kind of like Christmas getting everything out.
Ardis, I totally agree about boxes of uniform size. Right now I’ve got a lot of banker boxes that are filling up fast. I figure they’ll hold the weight when stacked. However, I do wonder how they’ll hold up on an extended drive jostling around in the back of a truck–I plan on bracing the boxes with the book cases and trying to make it all as tight as possible. I guess we’ll see.
One thing i found out at my last move was not even so much in the packing. I used banker boxes which were cheap and worked great for the move, (i dont know if i would trust them for extended storage) but my problem was my helpers. Sometimes you get a nice HT or missionary to help lug stuff in. Near the end a few helpers were kinda just heave hoeing the boxes inside and boxes full of books don’t like that. So maybe a warning to helpers they wont get their cut of pizza afterwards if they drop a book box.
Ha, that’s a good point, Shawn. I actually, for that stage, plan on being in the truck and placing them myself! And I’ll have plenty of dollies to cart them around. So hopefully the chance of getting dropped will be at a minimum!
To tackle the inventory problem, I started entering my books in the Book Collectorz software. It has a feature that allows you to identify the “location” of the book. So I numbered the boxes and added the box number to each book description.
That worked fine, but after I got through about 40 boxes, I ran out of time (and steam) before the move, so the majority of the books remain “lost” in the stacks of boxes. (Though it is fun to sift through them time to time when looking for a particular title).
Now that I’ll be unpacking soon, I’m looking for suggestions as to how to categorize them on the shelves. I don’t think Dewey Decimal will work because the range of topic material is so thin. And I’d like to keep my BH Roberts collection together on the shelf, but his material crosses several categories, including biography, doctrine, and history.
Any ideas?
Then there’s the separate question of whether I should even try to separate material based on ideological approach. I can see Bagley’s “Blood of the Prophets” near Turley’s “Mountain Meadows Massacre” without too much trouble. But I’m having a harder time thinking about putting Hinckley’s “Truth Restored” on the same shelf as the second edition of Quinn’s “Early Mormonism and the Magic World View.”
But those are probably topics for a different thread….
Just occurred to me that where Jared lives, they have bugs big enough to drag you down their hole and eat you. Is there anything one should do when storing books to keep the bugs out?
Chris, I’ll put up a thread for book organizing soon.
Keith, LOL. That’s a good question, though. Along with that, if you’re storing in a somewhat humid place (like a town near a large body of water), is there anything that needs to be done to preserve them?
Can you put boxes of baking soda around teh storage unit or something? Or is that for odor…hmm…
I am a fan of the banker boxes at costco, I too have about 100. I do not like to pack them full, this way I can find the book easier–just lift the lid and look in. Sometimes my moves are not permanent. and uniform size helps. I only use this one type of box for books, so as not confuse with any other junk.
We’ve been through many moves but have been in the same place for the last ten years. We buy the smaller size book boxes from storage or moving companies. They get recycled through family and friends.
I number the boxes and make a list as I pack. It helps. Now with computers it’s must be much easier to keep track. I’d tell you what the movers said about our many boxes of books during the last move, but then you’d have to ban me.
I’m looking forward to learning how to store old and possibly valuable books.
One more thing–I live in California and have been through a few earthquakes. Those freestanding bookcases need to be anchored to the wall. Even if all the books slide off it will be better than having a 6 or 7 foot tall case loaded with books fall over.
Delia, I’m finding the ability to discern the books from the “other junk”
an added bonus of using a uniformed type of box exclusively for the books. I’m using banker boxes.
SusanWH, stay tuned, we’ll have, hopefully, a guest post by someone with some background that might help in preserving old books.
You can ALSO contact US and we will pick up your collection?
This is sort of related to this thread – you can get a free copy of a potentially useful book collecting program today only :
http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/allmybooks/
It looks like you can even use a barcode scanner to enter the books. Maybe I’ll have to see if I can find one of the “Cue Cats” I got from Radio Shack nearly 15 years ago…