How many books do you own?

[bibliophage]

I did a quick and simple estimate, multiplying the number of shelves by the average number of books per shelf, and adding an estimate of the number of unshelved books.

I own just about 1,000 books, about half of of them purchased at library used book sales at $1 or less per volume. There are another 400 in my house that belong to other people.

I have read about two-thirds of my own books and about one-third of the other books in the house. I'm not making much of a dent in my personal library. More than half the books I read last year were from the 3 public libraries where I have borrowing privleges.

[eponymous]

Currently, I own around 2300 books, all catalogued by title, author, date published, and publisher. Most of the books I own I have read or partially read. I still have several hundred that I haven't read yet - someday.

[screech-owl]

At my home in Florida - about 600 (small condo).
At mom's house in New York - 37 boxes (number of books unknown).
On loan to people - 14.
Most are from when I worked at B&N - employee discounts can be a bad thing to impulsive people.

[oldscratch]

Not as many as I'd like. I've lost a few in moves. Around 300, mostly non fiction.

[Nymysys]

By using bibliophage's formula, I'm going to guesstimate around 800. Books in the living room, books in the bathroom, books in the hall, books piled around the bed, books piled IN the bed (hey, no one else is sleeping there but me, why not?), books in my roommate's room, books in the closet..........yeah. I like to read.

[Zenster]

[*]Over 1,000 cookbooks
[*]A couple of thousand other hard bound fiction
[*]A few hundred references
[*]The complete proceedings of the design, use and experimental set ups for the abandoned SSC (Superconducting Super Collider) project
[*]A few hundred classic sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks
[*]A couple of sets of encyclopedias
[*]Dozens of children's books including a library of "The Hardy Boys".
[*]Really odd little gems like "Applied Atomic Power" that details plans for nuclear powered locomotives (can you say Amtrak?) and aircraft.
[*]Miniature books like the "Observer" series and "Audel's" manuals.


People have looked at my cookbook library and exclaimed;

"You have more cookbooks than I have books of any type!"

I have read over 90% to 95% of all of the non-reference type books in my library.

[delphica]

I'm guessing around 1800, and maybe 400 of those are Mr. Del's.

Eponymous, how the heck do you do it? I'm very impressed. I have started to catalogue my books several times, and each time I get to about 30 books before I get distracted and start reading one of them. I keep them roughly separated by Fiction (arranged alpha by author), Children's (also alpha by author), and Non-fiction (arranged according to the Library of Delphica system, which essentially means they are grouped by subject, but some of the subjects are only recognizable to me). Then of course there are the results of times that company came over, and I had to run around scooping books up off the furniture and shelving them wherever they happened to fit.

[Flymaster]

Hmm...Good question. I'd guess I'm only around 500 or so, though. One day, I'll have many many more, though. It's tough to develop a good collection when you're living on a student's salary.

[Rasa]

All 300 or so of mine are still packed nicely on the other coast. I can't afford to have them shipped here!

[Pjen]

Approximately 20 000. I'm afraid I've never thrown away a book I've bought or acquired since 1968 and my house resembles a library.

And that's not to mention many thousand copies of articles from professional journals that one day I must put into order.

Great for checking references.

I'm retiring this year and building an enormous shed 18'x 12' by 10' in the garden specifically as a study and this will be completely shelved. At last my wife will be able to see the walls in the house!

[Quadzilla]

In my dorm room, roughly 104.
At home, probably 300 more.

[TV time]

My wife and I, both readers, had about 14,000 books, but we moved into a smaller home and had to give up around 5,000. At times it was like giving up children.

It turns out, however, that they sort of come back into our lives perodicly. We had one of those embossers that puts your name and initials in raised letters on an inside page of books (serious collectors hate the things because they reduce the resale value [like you read a book for its monetary value!]) and had used it on virtually all of our books. We gave or traded the vast majority of the books to two or three used bookstores (two were just starting out and were extremely glad to get the gifts. Some we gave to hospitals and some we gave to nursing homes. So now five or six years later, we will meet up with strangers at some sort of get together, who after we introduce ourselves, will immediately say, "Oh, you're so and so. I'm reading one of your books."

Generally we point out they are actually their books, but usually we end up having a great visit talking about books and about half the time trading some more books or suggesting new book titles to one another.

We live in a small town, and at times the local library will call us to ask us if we have books on a specific topic rather than go to interlibrary loan and take four to five weeks to get.

[fish in the sky]

About 130 in my dorm room.
Maybe 200+ more at my parent's house.

[Nacho4Sara]

I'd have to roughly guess about 900. There are 500 on my bookshelves in my room, about 100 floating around the house, and thirteen boxes in the attic. I recently gave away about 100 that I don't want anymore.

I write my name in all of them; about one-third are bought used from libraries; at least two-thirds of my reading material is borrowed from the library. I categorize them by Favorites, Mysteries, Children's, Classics, Non-Fiction, School, and Not Yet Read, although there is quite a bit of disorganization due to overlapping. Frankly, when I have a sudden urge to read Oliver Twist, it usually takes me about three hours to find it. Only the Favorites are easy to find - I always know where they are.

When I get my own place, I hope I can have several thousand.

[Fenris]

3887 SF Paperbacks, vintage and otherwise (I just had my database open )
Maybe 300 SF/F Hardcovers,including book club editions
A decent library of Cecil-eque books...maaaaaybe a hundred?
About 100 cookbooks
Maybe 500 other books

Fenris

[Booker57]

Comic books Around 1500
Real books 200 more or less
Paperbacks 800
The greatest number of PB's are stored in a large heavyduty cardboard box. This box is approximently 5ft by 3ft by 2ft. I have no idea what came in this box the first time around but filled up with PB's and it turned out to be way to heavy for me to move alone. Pulled it up in to the rafters of my garage with a chain fall. It is good to see that I am not alone in my love of books.MTS

[eponymous]

Delphica,

I had help initially in cataloguing all of my books - this was about 5 years ago and more than 1000 books ago. Every time I buy a book, I set it in a pile. Whenever I get time, I just update my database. Most of the books in my bookcases are organized into sections (Fiction, Sociology, Philosophy, Economics, etc.). I have one and a half very large bookcases dedicated solely to Geography (my field of study). So it's relatively easy for me to find a book I'm looking for.

I am not looking forward to moving, though...

[Dominique]

Best guess, around 2500, and I've read them all. The number is constantly expanding as I read very fast and there is always at least one and sometimes more that are in progress. I can't live without books.

I need more shelves!!

[Cumber]

'bout 150, methinks. There are a few thousand books owned by the other people in my house though. And I have aspirations for one day being the sort of person that can't remember what colour the walls are.

[TroubleAgain]

I'm going to make a WAG here and say probably about a thousand. Most are paperbacks, but I have some HB's and some antique books and some nice leather-bound classics that I've collected. If I had all the books I've read, however, my house wouldn't hold them all. I used to read at least 5 books every two weeks from the library, sometimes more. I always have a book in progress. I read every chance I get and have, ever since I was about 4. So since I'm now 34, that's 30 years of reading constantly. (Say, if I had a dollar for every book....dang, I'd be rich!)

[Elkman]

Last time I counted, my personal collection is around 500. My wife has got at least 500 more on the shelves. In storage, my wife figures she must have 1000+ romance novels (bathtub reading). Since Booker57 counts comic books so will I, which adds around 400 more to the total. This brings our grand total to around 2400 give or take. We're starting to slow down, as wall space for shelves is now practically nonexistant.

[schief2]

About 250 photography books - mostly the oversized, hardcover, coffee-table monograph types. (I need to buy some better bookcases...all the weight's giving the shelves a very obvious sag.) I've amassed what is IMHO a fairly respectable collection of the notable works by scrounging used bookstores and the net; I'd say less than 10% were bought new at full retail.

Maybe twice as many miscellaneous other books, split between here and my parents' house.

[screech-owl]

A friend will help you move.
A real friend will help you move your books.

[Mauvaise]

According to my SO who has had to move them 4 times in the last year and a half: Too Many.

I don't know number, but when I left LA for Detroit I had 28 boxes. Before I left MI I was able to go through and get rid of about 1/2. Since I've been in Phoenix, I've probably bought 2 more boxes worth.

If I had my way (meaning the money to do so) I'd have a lot more.

[TV time]

Just a note to "cumber". We have had people who have visited our house and commented that they would bet we save money on painting our walls since no one ever sees them because of the books. Or that staying in our house is like sleeping in some public library somewhere.

Someone commented earlier about always being in need of bookshelves. I might add bookends to that. There are just so many bricks, squarish stones and large seashells that can be found. I think three area librarys have me on their "most wanted" list for stealing those little metal bookends.

[Adventurious82]

Lets see now. I just dumped out a partial collection of 30 year old, cheap encyclopedia, followed by a 50 year old set, a box of real old readers digest hard bound book club books and some 25 year old college books.

That leaves me around 2,100 assorted books. Not including the ones I've not unpacked yet from moving here because I don't have room for more book shelves. I'm thinking of getting a new encyclopedia, but this one will be on disk.

[Fairy Princess Kitty]

Probably around 300, I would probably have about 1000 but my mother keeps making me weed them out because we don't have anyplace to put them. Another reason I'd love to move out but 300 isn't a bad start for a 15 year old kid without a steady income is it?

Kitty

[Little Nemo]

Dammit, Pjen, I was sure I'd be the winner here. I've got approx 15,000 books. The last time I moved my collection I required a 27 foot truck.

[CalMeacham]

God, I have no idea. Definitely in the thousands, but I've never counted. I figure if you know exactly how many books you have, then you either you don't have enough books, or else you have too much free time.

It's an eclectiic collection, too. LOTS of SF and Fantasy, but I'v got huge collections of plays, of comparative religion, of technical books (physics, mostly), history, mythology, humor, and reference. And that's not counting comic books, or my wife's book collection.

[Flutterby]

Thousands? Damn.. I would never even think about having thousands of books. And my Grandparents say I have too many as it is! I'd say I have about 100-150 maybe.. its a lot in paperbacks and I try to go through regularily to get rid of the ones I don't read much. Right now I have a box that I'm planning to take to a second hand store to trade what I can then give the rest away to charity. A lot of mine I also buy from the library but I also have a discount card for Coles and find myself looking at the hardcover books being sold for around 5-8 dollars everytime I go to the mall.

Grandma also says I read too much since I almost always have library books around my room. *sighs*

[Steve Wright]

Good news: last time I counted, only about 800.
Bad news: the last time I counted was in 1978.

Not that I'm complaining. Except when I have to move.

[Eve]

I am trying to winnow down my collection—I live in a one-bedroom with very little storage space (old buildings = lousy closets). So my rule is, "everytime I acquire a book, I have to get rid of one." My local library gets a LOT of donations from me.

I probably have about 300–500 books now. Everytime I write a book I have to buy maybe ten research books—and there are some (on theater or film history) I know I will need for future projects and have to hang onto.

I have a core of maybe 100 books I will never get rid of: novels or bios I love; valuable antiques; books by friends.

[Ukulele Ike]

Hmmmmm....just counted the bookshelves here at my work office and did the multiplication thang, and I'd have to say that, what with the double- and triple-shelving, I have close to 3,000 here. And that's just five 6-foot bookshelves, plus the desk and piled on the floor.

So at home, I probably have...Christ. 15 to 20 thousand?

[Eve]

Jesus, Ike—if there's an aftershock in Brooklyn, they'll need the body-sniffing dogs to find your family under all those books!

"Here, I think there's someone moving under these bound editions of Harper's magazine from the 1860s!"

[Ukulele Ike]

Not to mention the five grand pianos.

And I think I'm going blind, but it's okay, I'm treating myself by eating fifty oranges a day. My father was a physician, you know.

-- The Elder Collyer Brother

[FallenAngel]

When my wife and I first moved in together about 10 years ago, we merged our collections and decided to catalog them in a database. This was in the days of the PS/2 286-386 processor and Windows 3. We were using a flat file shareware DB that went BOOM and took a lot of other files with it right around the 3,500 book mark (so to speak). We were kind of impressed that at 21 and 23, respectively, we had that many volumes between us, and less than 10% were textbooks.

Since then, we've probably escalated to the approximately 10k volumes range, with topics covering law, biography, history, poetry (almost all of those are mine), classic lit, pulp fiction, sci fi, reference, various nonfiction and humor.

The sad thing is, we're now in the process of buying our first house primarily because our 940 sq. ft. apartment is completely lined with bookshelves and there are still lots of boxes and misc. stacks of books distributed somewhat creatively around the place.

In the new house (which incidentally cuts our commutes down to almost nothing as it is centrally located and only five miles from the I-17 freeway) we will have shelves in the master bedroom, both of our offices, the living room and the library/guest room. I've estimated it will take us approximate three more years at our current purchasing / reading rates before we have to move again or build additions.

[Fiver]

I have 1200-1500 "volumes." I put it like that because among the "volumes" I count as single "books" are bound series of issues of Skeptical Inquirer and spiralbound textbooks from some of my Navy training.

Eventually I intend to catalogue the volumes by Library of Congress number, but right now they're sorted mainly by size, large coffee table books on the lower shelves, mass-market paperbacks at the top.

They're also sorted by Read (pronounced "red") or Reference, and Not Yet Read. My Not Yet Read books number around 150-175. I do my best to read them at a faster rate than I'm adding to them, but it's not easy. Especially once December rolls around and all my friends and family give me books as Christmas gifts, "because Five loves to read." Sigh.

Ukulele Ike, I respect you and like you, but I simply can't believe you live in New York City and have room for five grand pianos, even if they're stacked.

[Melpomene]

By the time I was 12 I had about 500-600. I would stay up all night re-organizing them carefully. Sometimes Alpha by author, or Alpha by title, or by thickness, or by height or Alpha by subject then alpha by author, then alpha by title. My mom would come into my room at 3am to find me sitting on the floor wide awake with books strewn about my feet. TeeHeeHee.

Moving meant I had to pare down those books, which left me with about 300. Then a very sudden move from a house to a small one-room studio with 2 other people and a dog and not much storage space ina friend's attic...well, I had to pare down to about 200. It was so painful. Then I moved across country. I took as much as I could carry the first trip (25 books?) then started to accumulate more once I made my move. Eventually I had to go retrieve the rest of those boxes in storage, so I had to pare down again.

As of now, between storage and my active bookshelf, I think I'm back to pushing 250. *sigh* I would love to have tens of thousands of books one day. I wouldn't mind my FURNITURE being made up of books!

Ike, could ya spare a piano? I'd like to give it to my composer-SO for a valentine's present.

[missbunny]

I have about 1,500 or 2,000, with about 95% of them read, most at least twice. I also have several hundred magazines, arranged chronologically and by subject, in standing magazine files.

I have all the books separated, roughly following the LOC system, so that I know exactly which area to go to for any type of book. Once they are in the assigned area, they aren't alphabetized or anything because that would just take too long and besides, I'd get lazy about putting them back exactly where they were supposed to go so the whole system would eventually fall apart.

When I someday buy my place of residence I will have enormous built-in bookshelves constructed, according to a design I've been planning in my head for years. I am so looking forward to them!

[AuntiePam]

About 800, mostly hardcover, mostly fiction, mostly horror. It'd be more, but I've loaned and lost and donated quite a few over the years.

tv time -- your username qualifies as an oxymoron, I think. Unless you've taken out the guts and stored books in the TV set?

bibliophage -- 400 books belonging to other people? I'm missing a few.

[MonkeyMan]

Three books. A dogeared copy of the King James Bible, The Federalist Papers, Gun Care and Repair.

[Eo Echo]

About 600. Enough to fill three big bookcases and several boxes.

[Lynn Bodoni]

Originally posted by Nymysys
By using bibliophage's formula, I'm going to guesstimate around 800. Books in the living room, books in the bathroom, books in the hall, books piled around the bed, books piled IN the bed (hey, no one else is sleeping there but me, why not?), books in my roommate's room, books in the closet..........yeah. I like to read.

I don't have books IN the bed, but that's because my husband objects. I do have books piled in every room of the house, plus a couple dozen boxes of books out in the storage shed. I have no idea how many books I have. Lots and lots, but not enough.

[Tansu]

About 300 in the house, maybe 50-100 still at my parents' house. That's nowhere near enough. I'm planning to decorate the spare room soon, and that plan includes bookshelves. I've already started buying again, but when I've got the shelf space I can do it properly.

[AKAmame]

I haven't counted them in years, but we recently moved house and there were 64 movers boxes of books. I've had to prune the collection a bit - it won't fit in the new library. (You know, people think we're pretentious when we refer to the library, till they go into the room. I've been in real libraries with fewer books. And I wouldn't dream of telling you what the packers and movers said when they arrived!!)

Mystery, SF, fantasy, childrens, humour, especially American 20's to 50's humour, cooking, comics, reference in various science fields that Mr Mame and I work in, plus factual for other fields that interest us. Suppose eclectic is the word. Or maybe obsessive. Well-read sounds nicer.

[SkeptiJess]

I have around 1,100 or 1,200 books, most of them read and reread many times. I do go through and thin them out every year or so (my local Friends of the Library loves me), but still they multiple. And, Lynn? You're right -- it's never enough!

BTW, my lousy 1,200 books mark me, to most people I know, as a Genuine Book Person. Here, of course, I am a piker. I bow my head in respect to those of you with 3,000 or more! Can I come visit you?

[Dolores Reborn]

I probably have 750 to 1000 books. Two huge bookcases filled double deep (mostly paper backs) and boxes and bags full in closets and stacked around. A couple of years ago I sold about 300 to the used book store to make room for more. I love to read...

[Ukulele Ike]

Originally posted by Five
Ukulele Ike, I respect you and like you, but I simply can't believe you live in New York City and have room for five grand pianos, even if they're stacked.

No, it's my WIFE that's stacked. Bah-dum!

Actually, it's TEN grand pianos. That's what I get for relying on memory rather than double-checking.

For the full story of Those Marvelous Collyer Brothers, click here:

http://www.nydailynews.com/manual/ne...wn/chap106.htm

[bibliophage]

Originally posted by Nymysys
Books in the living room, books in the bathroom, books in the hall, books piled around the bed, books piled IN the bed (hey, no one else is sleeping there but me, why not?),

Once a few years ago I fell alseep while reading in bed. When I woke up I saw seven books and two notebooks on the bed beside me. I said, "Well, it's official: Books are my mistress."

It never even occurred to me to count cookbooks. That adds almost 100 more to my total.

I might have about twice as many as I do if I didn't move so much. I've moved 5 times in the last 10 years, and my library shrinks each time. Some I give away, some just get lost in the move. Ben Franklin said something like "Three removals is worth a house fire".

[Nymysys]

[quote]Originally posted by Lynn Bodoni

I don't have books IN the bed, but that's because my husband objects. I do have books piled in every room of the house, plus a couple dozen boxes of books out in the storage shed. I have no idea how many books I have. Lots and lots, but not enough.

I was asked the other night by a party that will remain innominate; if he were to offer to join me in the bed, would the books go, or would I make room for him?

I had to think awhile before answering.

Good to know your husband ranks higher.

And for Jess, I, too, feel humbled by our contemporaries. I'm hoping to be able to buy more once I actually settle down somewhere, though. This moving every six months for the past nine years creates havoc with having more than I do. <sigh>

bibliophage, I went to clean my room yesterday and removed 32 books and six magazines from my bed. I wonder sometimes if I'm the only person in the world that sleeps in a Queen-sized bed alone, and STILL wakes up hugging the edge. The books get more bed space than I do. <sigh again> I'd feel pitiful, except I know I'm just waiting for an equally verbose man to come along.