I have been working through with a few customers recently about how to size the shelves for their various sizes of books and magazines. Thought it might be something of interest, so here goes.
We can break this down into 3 main areas; Physical dimensions, total length and weight.
1) Physical dimensions
smpl. shelves come in two standard depths, being 200mm and 300mm.
For people who have a lot of standard A4 documents, the sizes are 210mm x 297mm, so in this instance we would typically use 200mm deep shelves at 375mm vertical spacing.
If you have many large format magazines, it is often wise to go for the 300mm depth variant. These would again typically be at 375mm vertical spacing
All shelves have ends that are 150mm high, so you can feel secure in the knowledge that your reading material will not fall off the end of the shelves!
2) Total length
The easiest way to size the total length of shelving required, is to pile them up and measure them. You can do this by grouping the books into similar sized stacked piles and take note of the approximate dimensions. Then it's just an addition process to determine the total length required.
3) Weight
As part of step 2, use some bathroom scales and add your total quantity of books up. While this number is relevant, the key number is not to exceed 20kg per shelf. Depending on what physical size your books are, you may find that they exceed this for a 900mm wide shelf. In this case if it’s even moderately close, please get in touch. An additional step for fully loaded bookshelves is to fix to the walls at every 150mm centres rather than a typical 300mm.
If you have any question, or would like to run anything by us, just let us know.