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A library fills up. The Shelf is where things go when they should stop taking up room in the sidebar without being archived, deleted, or moved somewhere you will forget.

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Shelving

Right-click a document (or a folder) and choose Shelve, or press ⌘⇧⌫ with the document open, or pick Shelve in the ⌘K command bar. It leaves Recents, Starred, the folder tree and All Documents, and appears in a Shelf section at the bottom of the sidebar — collapsed, with a count. Search still finds it, and you can open and edit it from the Shelf like anything else. Unshelve, from the same places, puts it back exactly where it was. Both are undoable with ⌘Z.

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On disk

A shelved document is moved into a Shelf folder at the top of the library that mirrors the structure underneath it: Essays/Draft.md becomes Shelf/Essays/Draft.md. Nothing about the file changes but where it sits, so it syncs like everything else and other apps see a plain folder. Unshelving moves it home and removes any folders left empty on the way. If you prefer, make the folder yourself in Finder and drag things in; Glassine treats anything under Shelf as shelved.