You look up the first column and tell it how many columns to go accross. In this case you have the columns the wrong way round.
Switch description to column A and shelf number to column B.
=VLOOKUP(Question cell,A1:B500,2,false)
Your biggest problem is you would have to type the query in exactly as in list. e.g. Hammer - not hammer
There are possibly a couple of other ways that may suit better.