For those of us made with Dewey decimal brains and card catalogue hands books are shelved from left to right top to bottom end of story full stop but books have ever been in different shapes and sizes so what to do if you're a librarian with limited space who would prefer that nobody touch a book or misshelve or mislay or fail to return part of the collection you can put them in special collections with limited hours and restricted access and hand out cotton gloves and forbid pen and ink and the cracking of spines which you can justify for manuscripts and books of a certain age but for the rest there are the stacks usually open access and always jam packed for such spaces books have been shelved in a variety of ways all on shelves of the same height with larger books slid in spines up shelf marks face up to the front but in earlier times books were shelved by size largest and tallest on the bottom shortest and smallest on the top b...