I couldn’t guess. I have books everywhere in the house. I have been trying to get rid of them, but so many more come in.
> 10,000.
My home has two libraries, one with 10 foot high built-in bookshelves, and a rolling ladder that lets me get up to the upper shelves. The other library has 8 floor to ceiling bookcases, some of which are double-packed with paperbacks. The master bedroom has built-in bookshelves for those books I want to keep handy there. 
I really need to thin the collection.
Wow! > 10,000 books?
Here I was thinking my collection of more than 1,000 would be close to the top.
I
was
wrong
Envy envy envy…
We are renovating our mountain home and one of the rooms now dedicated as a library is going to be repurposed.
I made it a priority that my books would have a place to be available and climate controlled.
So, the same outbuilding that will become the computer lab (and my office) will also have a dedicated suite for the library.
This is going to be a great year!
New computer lab (with a new computer) and a whole new library room!
I easily have close to 1000 books, and those are the ones I’ve chosen to keep. I’ve probably garage saled, or donated close to that many as well. I scavenge thrift shops and old bookstores on a regular basis and I get a bit nauseated when I mentally add up my Barnes and Noble habit.
They are all stored neatly in rubbermaid tubs. I keep a tub in the spare room that I put all the finished books in and when it gets full, it goes out to the garage. About once a year, I drag them all out, paw though them, get them organized, set some aside for a re-read, gather some for donations, (though work, we send a lot of books to our military in Iraq and Afghanistan), then put them all away again.
I love my books.
I don’t measure my book collection by volumes (number of books), but by volume (number of cubic feet). I have a rather large storage shed that is almost completely full of books, and I have books in every room in the house. I have far more books than I have bookshelf space, so I have to pack some of them up in boxes, which is where the storage shed comes in handy. I rotate the boxes in and out of the house, so it’s like diving into a treasure chest when I bring a box into the house. Sometimes I can bear to sell or give books away, but I know that for the most part, I won’t be able to find those old SF/fantasy books again, though with eBay and Amazon that’s become less of an issue.
I have lots and lots of books, in other words. Most of the walls in my house have bookshelves, and most of those bookshelves are overflowing with books.
I consider myself a library user rather than a book owner. I go to the library once a week, and I feel like I rarely buy books. And yet I just walked through the house doing rough counts of what’s on the shelves, then looked in the attic at the ones that are boxed, and found I am comfortably in the 1000 to 1999 range. :eek:
Quaddy, you adopting?
I think I love you.
I want to have a dedicated library but I’ve never had the space. I was going to turn one of my bedrooms into a library with built in shelves but I already converted the small bed room into an office and I don’t think a one bedroom 2000 sqft house will sell worth a damn. Oh well, once I have a permanent home I’ll get to do all the weird things.
Right now I have four 5’x3’ and one 7’x3’ bookcase full and about 5-6 moving boxes that I never had room to unpack full of books. I’d guess I’m slightly over 500.
Not people who use unnecessary U’s.
Somewhere around 300 or 400 at a guess, which isn’t nearly enough. I won’t be satisfied until I’ve accumulated enough books to cause a fairly serious distortion in L-space.
I’m somewhere in the 100-249 range, but I used to have a lot more. In my last two moves I sold/donated tons of stuff. The strange thing is, nowadays I find myself going back and trying to find some of the books I got rid of. In the last year I’ve probably spent a couple hundred bucks re-aquiring things that I gave to libraries or sold for a pittance at garage sales or used book stores.
I tend to measure the book collection by linear feet of shelf space, rather than by number of books. The Fantasy/SF section alone is now in excess of 72 feet, and I’m sure it is less than half of the total books in the house. Heck, my one-year-old probably has more than 100 books. My six-year-old received 37 books (with no duplicates!) for her birthday last week alone.
We’ve got one library with 9 foot bookshelves and if I want to reach the top I’ve got to hike a pant leg, grab a support and pull myself up.
I should have been a doctor.
Wow, dopers like to read! I thought I had a great deal but it looks like I’m just a piker at about 500.
I was going to ask if he was looking for a second wife. But the deal only applies if the library with the rolling ladder is part of his dowry.
(Wanders off to ponder which room I can sacrifice to create a library. We don’t really need a bathroom do we?)
Do you collect also? If you have a cool collection in similar tastes, shoot me a PM.
I’d guess three or four hundred. Kinda dwarfed by my DVD collection though (1000+)
It is my dream to have a room with floor to ceiling bookcases like this. If I were to walk into your library, I would likely not emerge for days. 
Nope, I have all the King books, but half of them are ratty-ass paperbacks picked up at thrift shops.
I collect firsts, too, but have not been active lately and, in fact, sold/traded a few either to fund important stuff like a kitchen remodel or to get a vintage guitar or two. Or three.
I don’t have any Arkham (I think **Exapno **may, though) and I only have The Shining by King because that is my favorite by him. You sound like a Completist, whereas I am a High Spotter (different approaches to book collecting)…
In terms of books, well, I have over-flowing shelves all over the house. Drives my wife crazy. Heck, the pile of about 30 books next to my bed drives my wife crazy.