Remember the library? I'll bet you don't, as after the first year at school, you'll probably move onto more interesting things. We did.
Not being a direct perpetrator of the heinous acts committed here, I cannot adequately explain the techniques, but I've had a good go.
You see, the library is organized into rows of shelves, as is any library. The thing that is different in the library near Lab6 (apart from the apparent overstocking of out of date BBC Basic books) is that it was run by two librarians who aut to have known better. They are, as far as I can tell, still aut, but now they know better.
Possibly the precursor to the Corridor Block, this involved getting as many books as possible and packing them into as little shelf space as possible. We managed to fit two shelves worth or more of books into one shelf, making it almost impossible to get a book out. Of course, we ended up having a couple of empty shelves after this, which led to the...
By clearing a whole shelf, it was possible to put books on it at roughly 15cm intervals, and to put a very heavy book at the end, rested on the bookend. We extended this setup over two or more shelves at a time. The result being, when the first book was tapped, it would hit the next book and start off a chain reaction. When it hit the heavy book at the end, it would fall off the shelf (usually the top one) and smash onto the floor very loudly. The beauty of it all was that we were back at the beginning of the rally, nowhere near the bang!
Plans were forged later on to extend this process over two levels of shelves (after having reached our limit of the whole row). When the rally reaches the end, the heavy book is knocked off. It may be possible to make this heavy book hit something on the way down, perhaps a starter book for the next level of rallying. This could be continued on up to five levels of shelving, across four shelf units. We never managed that one.
There's still a small possibility that one day, somebody will do the ultimate rally - the shelf domino rally. Basically, we wanted to do a rally that used the bookcases instead of books. Something that not even the most nutterish Vincents would do even on the last day of term ever.
We found that the shelves were pretty easy to remove. When turned upside down, the holes in the shelves no longer matched the pins holding them together, which meant that when the shelf was replaced, it was less stable than an un-horse-house. Placing books carefully on these 'rigged' shelves resulted in somebody coming along and picking a book from the shelf, and having the whole shelf load of books falling out. At it's height of popularity, this technique claimed up to three shelves at a time. Which was impressive.
Another interesting fact we discovered was the existence of small silver strips down the spines of books. These are the things used to detect whether or not you're carrying a book out in your bag. They seemed to be quite easily removable, but only the vandals among us actually tried it.
An end of term gag that everybody tries to do once, and Vinné tries to do many times, is the old tying the library doors together with industrial strength wire. No comment.
Finally, one thing we never got to do was waving a HUGE magnet around outside the library doors to see if we could set off the magnetic strip alarm. The reason we never did this was because Herr Champion confiscated Bertson's magnet, thinking it was a knuckle duster.
And the thing is, it probably was.