Several thousand between my wife and me.
Right, of course!
I used to have close to 2000 books, estimated. But then several years ago I moved from the States to Europe, and it wasn’t realistic to haul dozens and dozens of kilos of books across the ocean, so I made the painful cull, down to around 500 or so. In the years I’ve been here, I’ve acquired a fair number of new books, so let’s say I’m currently somewhere around 700.
My wife is a consume-and-discard reader (with rare exceptions), so her shelves (including cookbooks) add probably another 50-100 to the total number in the house.
I haven’t counted them, but would surprised if I didn’t have over 1,000 books. I know I have well over a hundred cookery books. Those are on shelves in the kitchen and are filed by type of cuisine. Biographies and factual books are filed haphazardly all over the place, upstairs and down, because they come in so many different shapes, sizes and topics. My novels live in the dining room and ARE filed by spine colour, which I fully appreciate makes some people look down on me, but I’m a designer, I think in colour, so it helps me when I want to find a certain book. And it looks neater.
I would never be organised enough to file by author.
I own very few books now, as a result of a divorce where I left, and she liquidated my assets out of spite. But I’ve never owned 1000 at once. Probably no more than a couple hundred at any given time.
But I always organized alphabetical by author’s name, sub alphabetical by book title.
At my peak I had over 3,000 books. I’ve downsized over the years, and lost some to accidents/damage, but still have over 1000. In a very small apartment, and some in boxes in a storage unit.
My e-book collection is smaller, but getting large enough I need a better way to organize them.
I probably have about 400 books here, most of them non-fiction, and probably another 200 in storage (i.e. in my Mother’s basement), so no, I don’t reach those heights. Since the Internet came along, my reading has reduced to about 5% of what I used to partake in, and now I don’t collect as many as I once did.
Sadly, I will die before I read my backlog of books.
Happily, I will always have something to read.
I think I have more than 100 books, but definitely less than 1000. I’m pretty sure I have downloaded more than 100 books from Project Gutenberg at this point.
I rarely buy books anymore. I usually read on my Kindle or borrow audio books from Libby. At one time, I’m sure I’ve had over 300 books in the house, but that would include kids’ books too. I’ve sold a lot of my books at rummage sales or donated them. I RARELY read a book twice. I’m not sure how many I have left. I still have boxes of kids’ books that even the grandkids have grown out of. I never had room for a library of books other than a couple of bookcases. They’re all in boxes in the basement. If I did have a library, I would have my books arranged similar to an actual library.
Indeed.
But I own about 1,000 books (not 15,000) all of which I have read (quite a few more than once.)
I read every day (including in the bathroom 
) and on average get through a book each week.
So I easily read 50+ books a year - and I’m now 70 (with lots of spare time. 
)
I keep a journal where I list when I finish a book, inspired by my daughter. I read 87 in 2021 and 77 in 2022. But since high school up until when my second daughter was born I had steno notebooks where I listed when and where I bought books and when I read them. Back in 1969 I was reading two a day. No internet back then, so more time.
I tell people that I’m not going until I catch up on my reading, so I plan to be around until I’m 120, 48 years from now.
I heard that you’re not allowed to die until you’ve read all your books. So I figure I’m good for another century.
Either that or “I’m a paranoid time traveler from the Middle Ages.” Back then books were so precious that they were often shelved spine-in with a chain through the spine. That way you could take the books down and read them at a lectern attached to the shelf, but not wander off with the book. In those days the spine was not usually marked with the title anyway, so it wasn’t quite as nonsensical as it seems.
I’ve read way, way over a thousand books in my life but am not part of the 1% mentioned in the first post. I prefer physical books despite the portability and convenience of digital versions.
Here’s what I wrote about my books last year:
All my life I thought of myself as a book person. I bought lots of them, I went to new and used bookstores all the time, etc. I loved books.
But to quote myself from four years ago:
Owning lots of paper books is just lovely, UNTIL IT’S TIME TO MOVE! Speaking as someone who owns a couple thousand paper volumes, and who has just moved from a very large house with lots of built-in bookcases to a much smaller one with no built-ins (until we finish the basement), I have, for the first time in my life, begun to rethink my attachment to paper books.
Yes, they look nice on the shelves. Yes, they are impressive to visitors. Yes, they feel nice and smell nice (mostly). And yes, they serve as a kind of portrait of you and your interests throughout your life. (For me, this is the real reason I am so reluctant to get rid of them.)
But let’s face it: if you own, say, 2,000 volumes, how often do you actually go back to reread or even briefly refer to any one book? How many have you read once, put on the shelf, and never touched again? How many have you started and never finished? How many have you bought and never even read?
On this last move we used movers, so I didn’t personally carry those 70 fifty-pound boxes of books from the house to the van or from the van into the new house (in the July heat). But I packed them all myself, and I’ll be moving them from the garage and unpacking them when we eventually get the shelf space. And it’s not as easy for me at 63 as it was when I was 53, or 43, or 23.
If you’re lucky enough, as we were, to have space for your books, and your if life is stable enough that you aren’t likely to have to move (ours wasn’t), there may be little downside to owning a big private library. But my wife and I are less than a decade from retiring, and at that time will probably move to an even smaller house or condo. So the cons of owning lots of books are beginning to outweigh the pros, for me.
Since I wrote that, we’ve moved once again, to an even smaller house with much, much less shelf space for books than our last place. We gave away fully half of our 2,200 books before we moved last year, and yet only a small fraction of those we kept are shelved here in the small cottage that we’re sharing with my mother-in-law. The rest remained boxed up in off-site storage.
I bought a Kindle 13 years ago, but I haven’t used it since getting my first Android tablet shortly after that. People complain about the glare, etc., but it doesn’t bother me that much, and the convenience of using the same device I use for most of my Web browsing completely overshadows that slight issue.
I don’t expect to buy a new paper book ever again, and the only book I might conceivably see myself buying would be something rare and very important to me, although I can’t think of any possibilities at the moment. As I’ve aged, the importance of owning “stuff” has dramatically declined.
I don’t keep that many physical books these days. Had a major clearout a few years ago when I moved back to the UK from the US: went through things and asked the Main Question: am I really going to read this again?
Given libraries and the Internet I’m fairly confident I can find anything I want nowadays. Though it is nice to have a few old favorites on hand for a day when you’re feeling a bit down and nostalgic…
I just counted the books on one bookshelf, and multiple by the number of shelves i can see, and got ~600. Extrapolating to the rest of the house, we probably own 2000-3000 books, almost all of which one of us has read. (Or used, like a cook book.)
We organize by subject. Within the subjects they are mostly sorted by author, but some are sorted by size. You can fit more books if you sit them by size.
Oversized books are the bane of my existence.
Or at least one of many banes.
It’s not just “oversized” books. The science fiction is separated between hardcover and paperback books, and the paperback shelves are closer together.
Paperbacks I cannot bring myself to shelf separately, because keeping an author’s books together just dominates.
I only buy bookcases with adjustable shelves. If all hardback books just kept to the 8.5" norm I could divide the spacing perfectly. But no. Some books have to be 9" or 9.5" just to make my life miserable. Author name wins out again. So on some shelves a book or several have to lie flat and spoil the sightline.
Banes, banes, banes.