While writing my sermon for Easter morning (my sermon for the Great Vigil of Easter tonight is finished), MicroSoft spell-check not only growled at "reshelve" but suggested "reshelf" as the way to fix my misuse. Nonsense.

In my humble opinion, a reshelf job would be one in which workers removed the old shelves and put in new ones. A reshelve job is one in which underpaid minions of the library are seen pushing carts of returned books around and sticking them back where they belong on the shelves.

Hmmm. I wonder if just shelve would be good enough. I'm assuming the context to be something like: I had a box of books to reshelve.

Would it make a particle of difference if that particular box of books had never been on a shelf before? What does the re- prefix add?

By the way, did you know that the primary shelving sort for books in the Library of Cngress is by height?

Some years ago some shelver noticed that there was a great quantity of air stored above the books in the Library, so he suggested that, with the advent of computers, it made the most sense to shelve all the 11 inch tall books together, etc., and let the computer keep track of which books were on which shelf.

The possibly apocryphal story is that there was great resistance to this among the traditionalists, but eventually the powers that be bought into the idea and they paid the person pretty big bucks for the suggestion.

But can you imagine what the cost for converting was??

TEd

PS

I just checked onelook, and neither reshelve nor reshelf is listed (not surprisingly) but look at the quick definition for shelve:

verb: place on a shelve (Example: "Shelve books")
verb: hold back to a later time


OOOPS!

T

"By the way, did you know that the primary shelving sort for books in the Library of Cngress is by height?"

That's how we sort the books in the off-site storage library for the library where I work. It's kinda creepy going in there; the shelves are mechanical and the push of a button will move this entire huge range of shelving to one side or the other for a book to be retrieved. I helped move some of the books to that site last year. Each and every volume has its barcode keyed in along with the one for the shelf so its "address" can be looked up in the event some hapless fool wants to check it out. I have no idea how involved the check out procedure is for storage books; I work in a building with windows and desks and shelves that stay put. Mostly. We've had to add a few robot shelves as space gets tighter...

I think that in a library, reshelve might be a little clearer, if only to clarify between holding the book for somebody to pick up at a later time - which is also called "shelve", and simply putting a book back on a shelf that was taken off the shelf by a reader.