Are you part of the 3%? Talkin' Bout Books

Cafe Society
21

I’m sure I have well over a thousand books in the house, though I’m not about to count them.

I haven’t read all of them. But then, I’ve read a whole lot of books that aren’t now in the house, also; much of my reading comes from libraries, and has to go back.

I used to read several books a week. I do rather too much of my reading now online, so it’s less; but it’s still way over ten per year, at least a book or two a week and sometimes more; and I’ve been reading for about 69 years now, though probably not as many the first couple of years. Sometimes I re-read books, and some books I’ve read multiple times; but a lot of them I only read once.

The books in this house are at this point hardly organized at all. They used to be organized very roughly by my idea of genre and within genre alphabetically by author’s last name.

I inherited some of them. I got some of them as gifts. Some of them came in boxes of other books, from yard sales or whatever. I intended, and may still intend, to read some of them but haven’t gotten around to it. The previous categories all overlap with each other.

I’ve tried to weed the bookcases and get rid of the ones I don’t want. The problem is, I get about three books in from the first corner of the first shelf of whatever bookcase I start on, and I come across something that I don’t know whether I want to keep or not – I don’t remember it well enough, if I’ve read it at all. So then I have to read that book, in order to find out. And that’s all the bookshelf weeding that will get done in that session, because I stopped to read.

The additional problem is – unless something is really awful, I think I might want to keep it, or to give it to somebody in particular. And if it is really awful, I don’t want to give it to anybody else, even via a library sale or whatever – this book says horrible inaccurate things! I don’t want somebody who might believe them to read it! But I have trouble throwing books away; it bothers the back of my head.

Yeah, I’ve got some of those too. A few are literally cookbooks. More of them are farming information books of various sorts, some fairly new and some antique and some in the middle.

22

I’ve had hundreds of books, never got rid of them for decades. Now? Books are meant to be read. I’ve passed most of my books to friends to enjoy. When we had to move them to paint the room is when I changed my idea of books. Had books I hadn’t read in 30 years, yep, time to give them away. I still have a hundred books that I pull of the shelf and reread. I don’t want a room full of books that my wife would have to get rid of after I’m gone. I’m getting more books from the library now.

23

I’m well over a thousand physical books, and that’s after having to purge my basement library due to massive mold infiltration of the room. I worked for Waldenbooks in HS and during summers in college, and that started me on the road to my first 1000. I have an upstairs library that has a rolling ladder so I can reach the upper levels of the shelves, and where most of my hardcovers reside. I have a downstairs (basement) library where it’s mostly paperbacks, along with some specialty collections.

My Tolkien collection takes up a LOT of space too.

My oldest books are not super old: One is a book on medicine from the 1850’s originally owned by my wife’s ancestor who was the overseer and ‘medic’ on a slave plantation. Another is an old family bible from the 1850’s originally owned by my 3 x great grandfather.

I estimate I’ve read over 90% of my library

24

As I said, I have read many, many books from libraries. And some books I’ve read multiple times. (I’ve the wonderful superpower of never remembering whodunit in mysteries.) And my books go back 60 years, which cuts the per day number down.

If I was interested enough to pick it up, then I might be interested in reading it someday. I tell myself. And my wife.

25

I’m impressed people own this many books. I use the library, so my actual book collection is either 100-200 or 200-300.

26

I have a set of Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories…Christian children’s books from the fifties. They belonged to my grandma, and I read them many times as a child, so I can’t throw them away although I also can’t stand the thought of any other poor impressionable kid reading them.

27

I have maybe a couple hundred books. One bookcase is arranged chronologically, one by favoritism, and one haphazardly. That last one is mostly books my kids left behind, plus whatever other reading material has mysteriously accumulated.
What I actually read takes up just one shelf and constantly changes as it arrives from or returns to the library.

28

Hi, I’m ECG, and I’m a book addict.

I don’t have an exact count, but counting the number of books on a high density shelf and a low density shelf then using approximately that number for total shelves of each type, I ended up with about 3500 books. For a rough count I’d say that’s probably +/- a couple of hundred.

Mrs. Geek is a book addict too, but she probably only has a couple hundred books. She is much better about getting rid of hers than I am. She also reads a lot of books on her tablet. I hate reading books on a tablet. I’ve read a lot of technical books and manuals on the computer, but I have only read a couple of books for entertainment.

The Book Thing of Baltimore has been a huge weakness for me. They have a limit. You can’t take more than 150,000 free books per day (that’s their humorous way of saying they don’t have a limit). I would typically walk out of there with somewhere between 50 and 100 books every time we went. They closed down for the pandemic, and I have been intentionally avoiding checking to see if they are open again. I still have a pile of unread books, plus I am running out of places to put any more bookshelves. Although now that I think about it there are a couple of rooms in the basement that I could clean out…

ETA: I checked and the Book Thing is still basically on pandemic hours. Instead of being open Saturday and Sunday every weekend, they are open for limited hours roughly one day per month.

Must not get more books until I have read all of the ones I have… must not get more books…

29

I don’t think of having that many books as an impressive thing. It just kind of happened. I’ve probably only read half of them, but I still have high hopes for the others. I inherited some of them, bought others off tables of remaindered books, bought many of them used, and was given a few. Most of the ones I actually bought new at full retail were ones I was eager to read, but the others were aspirational. I find myself hoarding unread books - what if the library wasn’t available? It’s vital to have books ready for an emergency.

30

I suppose it’s slightly better than the thing of shelving them all spine-in, but either one just screams to me “I’m illiterate and want everyone to know it”. Not the message I want my decor to be sending.

Right now, my collection is mostly in boxes in my closet, because I never completely unpacked after my last move. Though books I’ve accumulated since are more or less in a big pile. They should be by genre then author, and will be once I ever get around to unpacking (probably after the next move).

I don’t think I have any books much older than a century. The oldest, I think, is a physics textbook from the year before the Anno Mirabilis (man, if that author had known what was in store…). The old book I’m proudest of is an early-edition CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, with leather binding and gilt pages.

31

I had easily 1,000 books until recently, when I had a book purge last year and gave away many boxes of them.

I just counted, and I still have 310 books in my home office. My wife has a hundred or so in her home office, and we turned the dining roo into a library/sitting room when we moved in, and although I’ve now cleaned out quite a bit of it there are still a couple hundred books in it as a guess.

We have hundreds of books on our Kindle account, but they are mostly my wife’s. I have maybe 50 there.

We are both lifelong voracious readers of both fiction and non-fiction, and in the pre-internet era I owned a lot of books just for reference value. I just gave away a copy of “The Encyclopedia of Weapons and Warfare”, all 24 volumes of it. We both kept all of our college texts as well. And being a computer programmer since the 1970’s, I have zillion programming books. I’m looking at my copy of “Programming the 6809” on the shelf right now… I bought that in 1982.

32

I’ve been holding steady at, I’m guessing, around 200 books. I used to purposely accumulate books, but I’ve begun donating them now and then.

Just recently I’ve been going to the li-berry for most of my bookish needs. I also can’t pass up a library’s used book sale. It’s been a while since I’ve paid retail price for a book.

I have maybe a dozen e-books. I’m not a fan.

mmm

33

Same here. And I’m talking about a move I made in 2006. Most of what I’ve unpacked was the boxes of unread books.

Speaking of which: It’s been a while since I’ve counted them, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I have close to 1000 unread physical books.

34

Yeah. They kind of accumulate. I bought very few of them new, though I did buy a fair number of them used. But a lot of them were gifts, or abandoned here, or inherited.

They closed the libraries during the first phase of covid. (That took me by surprise – they said “essential services” were staying open!) I hate reading anything very long on a computer. It was a huge comfort to me to know that there were lots of books in the house. And yes I did read some of them!

L.H. Bailey, The Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture, 1933. (I don’t think that’s the oldest book in the house, but I don’t think there are more than a handful older, and none much older. And it’s to hand. Still a lot of good info in there, though of course some of it’s out of date.) – one of my favorite memories about Bailey – I’m no longer sure if it was this book – is from an organic farming conference sometime in the 1990’s. There was a speaker who thought he had to convince us that this wasn’t a new idea, and he quoted a bit from Bailey and then announced, in a tone of triumph, the date of the work; and paused for reaction.

He had misjudged his audience. What he got was a chorus of multiple voices correcting the date of his particular quote, which he had off by a couple of years. (I wasn’t one of them; I didn’t have that particular bit of info in my head.) He took another look at the particular book he was quoting from; the chorus was right. – threw him off his stride a bit for the rest of his speech. I think he was used to giving it to groups who didn’t know much about the subject.

35

Yes, I have lots of books…

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Over 1500 volumes, probably more than that. It’s about 210 linear feet of shelf space. Topics include:

Classical music and opera, including the 20-volume Grove Dictonary of Music.

Theater and playwrights, with a concentration on English writers.

Russia/former Soviet Union: literature, history, and political science.

Western European 19th and 20th century literature but not much emphasis on Britain, although I do have some Agatha Cristie, Daphne du Maurier, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Charles Dickens, and a few others.

History and politics of 20th century Latin America.

Classical Greek Literature.

20th century Italian writers in English translation, particular enphasis on works describing the Italian civilian experience in WWII.

Mid to late 20th century literature by western American and Canadian authors.

Western US history, Native Ameican history, with an emphasis on Oregon, the California Gold Rush, and western settlement.

Fine art and architecture, with an emphasis on 19th and 20th century European artists and American architecture. Some coverage of older artistic traditions and icons as well.

Plus a bunch other random stuff. I have most of the red DeLorme U.S. atlases (I’m missing Hawaii and a couple of New England states), I have a copy of the New Testament printed in 1587, and my mom’s ancient and well-worn copy of the Joy Of Cooking.

36

I’ll guess I was over 2000, but we retired and donated a huge number of professional and teaching books. We also are engaged in a year-long Thing Cleanout, so additional boxes of books have been donated (“If I ever need to read Ulysses again, I’ll go to the library”). I use a lot of my books for reference when I write, so there are many books I’ll dip into but not (re)read completely. I’m not sure how many I have now. I have over 700 audiobooks and many ebooks as well.

  • Kitchen: Cookbooks/food books
  • Living room: Birds, travel, local info (hikes, birds, history, geology, etc.), culture/travelogue, art/maps/similar too large to fit in a standard case
  • Hall: Language/linguistics, pilgrimage/Middle Ages, religion/historical odes & sagas, mystery
  • Guest room: Children’s/YA
  • My lovely wife’s study: Biography, memoir
  • My study: My journals, my publications, books about writing, poetry, drama, fiction, speculative fiction/fantasy, mixed oversized, LGBTQIA*, psychology, medical/health, AIDS, cancer, developing world/microfinance, art therapy/personal meaning-making, personal mythos, Buddhism/mindfulness, math/physics, natural history, education, books related to current writing project
  • Bedroom: TBR, graphic/comic, humor

ETA: Here’s my study:

I organize by subject, more or less. Some categories are subgrouped or alpha by author. I occasionally set up a shelf in the living room on a theme like sequential numbers, rats, colors, single word titles, or title structure (e.g., The X and the Y). No one ever notices.

37

I’m having some serious bookcase envy here. And they’re so clean! I hate to dust, and it shows on my shelves.

38

Reminds me of home when I was growing up.

39

I’ve got about 6500 sf books and magazines (slightly over half magazines) arranged by author and title, with anthologies separate. I have a spreadsheet and a database of them. My wife has an office full of books also, never been counted. I was going to say I don’t have many ebooks, since I only read them from the library, but then I remembered I have a bit over 100 from a book contest I’ve judged for a few years where most of the submissions are ebooks.
I have a closet full of hardcovers but the vast majority of books are paperbacks.

40

I’ve probably got about 5000 books, give or take. With the exception of novels, I’ve read very few back-to-back; I tend to use the non-fiction ones as reference sources. A good example of such would be Hogg’s Constitutional Law of Canada. Not something that needs to be read cover to cover, but very handy at finding precedents on specific topics that I need to find out about for my legal research.

Even when it’s not such a heavy topic, I do try to organize my books. Mostly by topic, so sports books are here, and history is there, and biographies are in the guest room, second bookshelf from the left. I don’t always succeed, so some things look out of place. (Just looking at one of my shelves now, I see a book on horse race handicapping between a biography of Abraham Lincoln and a book on bird watching.) But I can generally put my hand on whatever I need, no matter where it is.