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.
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.
A friend will help you move.
A real friend will help you move your books.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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!”
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
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.
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.
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. 
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!
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.