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




TEd