Spring Cleaning

When the time comes around to your corner of the world, how do you clean your bookshelves, if you do? Do you take all the books off the shelfs, clean the shelves and put them back on? Do you have strategies (short of walling off the shelves) for better dust management during the year? Or maybe just a tiny feather duster to get between the spines? Do you assess your collection at the same time, relegating things to the to-be-sold/given-away pile?

I have tended to rearrange my shelves once a year, but since I've settled on an ordering I like, I was thinking this might be a year where I pull everything out just for the sake of deep cleaning the shelves.

To be honest I've had shelves stacked for years without taking them out collectively, though most behind glass. Perhaps worth investing in an archival level dust vac (I think Gaylord sells them starting around $250) as feather dusting usually just rubs it in further. Another plus is you can just run the vac on the top page blocks and around for routine dusting, without taking everything off. I'm willing to accept dust if I don't have to tediously clean every year or heaven forbid with more frequency. I really don't notice much of a difference even after decades, save for the bottom shelving under the page block with the 2-line dust trail.

Re: dust management... my part of California has a lot of particulates in the air, and keeping things clean in my home is a constant battle. So for the "nice" bookshelves (and really, any displays with delicate items), I added glass doors. I didn't spend any effort on sealing them, but just keeping the room's air movement away from the books turned out to almost completely solve the problem. The rest of my space could be covered in a fine layer of topsoil, but the books wouldn't even need dusting.

Once a year I might run a feather duster over the parts of the shelves exposed to the cracks between the doors, but that's about it; the books themselves almost never need cleaning. I'm just glad I don't have to worry too much about humidity here.

Depending on the level of dust where you are, and how much you keep your windows open, standalone air purifiers can work wonders too. (When the sky was orange from wildfire smoke a few years ago, I was still breathing just fine because of those.)

I have a vinyl collection that's open to air, and it's...well, it's a hassle, honestly. I end up doing a fairly formal annual cleaning-of-the-shelves with those (pull a batch of records off, clean tops, wipe down shelf, replace, repeat). At least my records are in plastic sleeves; for books (particularly antique/fine-press/etc), I feel like normal cleaning methods for books are mostly off the table (as dotman said about feather dusters, maybe preferring soft brushes instead; no solvents/cleaners/etc, bias to vacuum/compressed air rather than wiping).

And what is this "relegating things to the to-be-sold/given-away pile" you speak of? This confuses me. ;)