Re: On retreat 21-25 July

Kip Williams <kip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, mrkipw@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Cryptoengineer wrote:
David Friedman <ddfr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If I correctly understand what Keith was describing, no brackets
are required.

Correct. They're mostly just held together by gravity, but in a few
critical places I use nails.

Check the photos he posts of his own apartment. There's a couple
that shows a board about 6 feet long spanning a pair of doorways.
It appears to have a post supporting it between the two.

Correct. Except that it's eight feet long, not six.

It's one foot wide, and, though you can't tell in the photos, there
are books on *both* sides, i.e. nearly half are facing the entry hall
or the kitchen. The dead spaces that face walls are occupied by
styrofoam blocks or empty cardboard boxes. And by several dead UPS
batteries as counterweights to keep the shelf from leaning.

If you took more than a couple books off it, you'd be in severe
danger of many falling off as the remainder fell into the gap.

Nonsense. I can take any number off.

I can even knock the support post loose and all that will happen
is the board will sag in the middle. No books will fall. (Yes, it
happened once.)

I have three other identical boards, all of which are also visible in
the photos. They came from a discarded shelving unit whose vertical
parts were broken. One of them is supported in the middle by a
CD case which in turn is supported by a tower PC which in turn is
supported by a cabinet. (I also have various other boards strung
up here and there.)

It would probably be difficult to shelve books into without a
stepstool, since there's no indication of any back to the shelf.

They're all exactly six feet high, which is right above my head level.
(If my hair isn't combed, it touches the shelves as I walk under
them. This is useful in finding my way to the bathroom in complete
darkness.) So I've never needed a stepstool to add or remove a book.
Nor do I need my glasses to read a title. I might if I was
significantly shorter, of course.

Conversely, I have to remember to warm tall visitors to duck. One
visitor who did bang his forehead on one forgave me when he saw books
that he had published on it.

For a while I increased our shelf space by putting a board between
two metal shelf units, over the copier. Eventually, we took this
shelf down. Not sure why, though I suspect things simply decided to
fall off from time to time. We used it for equipment manuals and
log books.

You can never have too many shelves. The shelf is the greatest of
man's many inventions, since it provides a place to put all his
other inventions.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.
.

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