Modern Vespa

Greetings Modern Vespa,

In my job as a book conservation technician, I am working on the conservation and re-housing of my library's oversize rare books (books built before 1750!).
A majority of my time is spent making custom drop spine clamshell boxes for this incredible collection. Now my Boss and I have made various structural and material decisions based on our collective knowledge as well as conservation standards.

But after building 150+- boxes, one question persists with every box I build; will a double wall drop spine clamshell box protect it's contents in the unfortunate event of a fall from the shelf?

OOPS!: The dropping of the Box is an event to satiate my curiosity and promote useful knowledge.
The box will be dropped at least once and hopefully three times from progressively higher shelves in the stacks!


Regards,

Elena Bouvier

This is what I did at work on Tuesday August 24, 2010

I hope you enjoy it

As someone who thought at one time about going into book conservation, I can appreciate this. You must love being surrounded by old books.

What an amazing job! I too thought about persuing a career in book & art conservation & restoration. I like saving old things...

Great job on the boxes!! Thanks for sharing!

I love watching how the body language of the observers goes from eager to 'meh' over the course of the experiment.

I have just one question. Did you put something in the box to simulate the weight of a book? If not then your test is flawed. Without the added weight of the "book" you don't know about the added pressure it will put on the structure of the box when it hits the floor.

But look at it this way at least you get to make another cool video.

Chichikov and Scootie-patootie,
yes I am a very lucky woman! Our library has a fabulous collection of natural history, botany, maps and physics/ calculus. So why didn't either of you pursue conservation careers?

kcphoto2008,

the box was built to hold a clay brick at approximately 5lbs, the the density and proportions of the brick to an oversize book are pretty close.

If you watch the video, you'll see the box open upon impact 3 times revealing the brick wrapped in tyvek.

I saw something a couple times when the box popped open but couldn't tell from the video what it was. That's good, it simulates the stress a book would put on the box. A bag of lead shot works well too and it moves around some which causes bounces and other stresses. Guess I spent too much time in classes in years past trying to break things.