Rachel Kramer Bussel has written about hoarding before.
How many books does a person have to own to officially be labeled a book hoarder? According to Shelfari’s Compulsive Book Hoarders Group, the answer is simple: 1,000 or more. I wish I could honestly answer “there’s no such thing as too many books,” but as I learned from experience, that’s not true. Nothing brought this home for me like watching paid professionals cart away hundreds of books—read and unread, purchased lovingly or attained at book parties or conferences—when I hired a trash removal service last year upon moving from my two-bedroom apartment after 13 years. The most heartbreaking part was seeing anthologies I’d edited, with my name right there on the cover, being swept away into giant garbage cans. This was reinforced when I moved again this year, and was told by the movers, multiple times, that my boxes of books, rather than furniture like a bed and a couch, was what was weighing down their truck.
Books were far and away the most challenging possessions for me to part with. Unopened Talk magazines, dresses I’d forgotten I’d owned, even CDs I’d once coveted, I said goodbye to without much angst. But sending off hundreds of books to their death made me feel like a part of me was dying too. I don’t mean that I’m so far gone I believe my books are alive, but I do believe they are more than simply objects, pieces of paper with print attached inside a pretty cover. If that’s all I thought they were, I don’t think I’d ever have pursued writing so passionately, or cried the first time my words got published in a book.
Even more than I identify as a writer, I identify as a reader. Reading has always been the primary way I make sense of the world around me; books are my first stop when I want to learn about a new hobby, culture, person or world. When I read a memoir, the author’s story lives inside me, making me feel I know them better than I do many of my close friends. While I don’t necessarily need to own a book for it to have any impact on me, being surrounded by books when I wake up and go to sleep puts me at ease—and gives me plenty to choose from should I find myself up at three a.m., as I often do. I’m not a book collector, though, someone who values signed copies the way toy collectors want their treasures in opened, and therefore more valuable, boxes. I believe books are valuable precisely for the words contained inside of them, rather than the packaging binding them. Books are meant to be savored, labored over, argued with, and shared. Amongst the approximately two thousand books I own (give or take several hundred—I’d rather read them than count them), none are rare in any way. I refused to be someone whose prized tomes are wrapped in protective covers, fearful of fingerprints.
My most expensive ones are art and photography books. So the rational side of me knows that most any book I once owned I can procure again, from the library on my new block, or electronically. Even out-of-print books can be ferreted out for a price. But the books I’ve owned, read and pondered carry memories inside their covers. My friend Jessica Cutler’s novel The Washingtonienne, sporting its pink bra and cleavage, reminds me of the days when she was just the star of a scandal to me, rather than someone I hang out with. I look at her novel differently because of that. Even books that have merely sat on a shelf for years have done their job, patiently waiting to be noticed. I don’t want someone else’s copy. Instead, I revert to that most selfish of children’s rants: mine!
Yet I keep wondering what the lost books say about me, what messages I’m sending by prioritizing some books over others. Does my rescuing of Richard Kern’s explicit photo book New York Girls over Matt Logelin’s widower memoir Two Kisses for Maddy mean I’m more interested in sex than death? Not necessarily. I’ve owned the Kern book for over a decade, but can’t say I’ve looked at it more than a handful of times. I probably wouldn’t have remembered I owned it if I hadn’t stumbled across it.
Whereas with Logelin, I’d thought I’d known his story from reading his blog—his wife died 72 hours after giving birth to their only child. But reading the death scene there haunted me; it’s one I’m unlikely to ever forget. It’s one I recalled when I visited my grandmother’s corpse the day she died. A good book stays with you whether you own it or not; its words take up permanent residence in your mind. The rest simply occupy a very temporary space in your temporal lobe, gliding gently by but never settling in and making themselves at home.
My problem, ultimately, aside from what I’m pretty sure would meet the new DSM-V categorization of hoarding disorder (“characterized by the persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of the value others may attribute to these possessions”), is the almost gluttonous thrill that runs through me when I acquire new books. Holding a stack in my hands makes me want to push aside everything else I’m meant to be doing and devour them. If I could read two at once, I would. I look forward to the release of new books the way I do vacations, sometimes even marking my calendar (I just checked off The Possibilities by Kaui Hart Hemmings, May 13). When I read that Dylan Landis’s novel Rainey Royal will be published in September, the first thing I did was pluck my signed copy of Normal People Don’t Live Like This (an apt title for hoarders), where I first met Rainey. While many of my books are currently living in boxes in my basement, my favorites, like Landis’s, get pride of place so they’re easily accessible.
Books are also stepping stones to other books. I love being able to trace not only where I purchased a book, but what interested me in it in the first place. Though I didn’t make it through all of Katie Roiphe’s In Praise of Messy Lives, her Mad Men essay, which quoted Don Draper quoting Frank O’Hara’s poem “Mayakovsky” led me both to O’Hara and his Russian friend. Then, when I stumbled upon Matthew Dickman’s poetry collection Mayakovsky’s Revolver, the title alone was enough to intrigue me.
Lest you think I’m too awful a person to have let so many books find their way into a New York City dump, I will tell you that I tried to let my books go gently in the months preceding my move. I donated hundreds to bookstores The Strand and Housing Works. Recognizing that it’s highly unlikely I will go into filmmaking, I asked my Facebook friends if anyone wanted indie producer Christine Vachon’s Shooting to Kill, and was more than happy to send it to a film nerd friend. I wish I could have gifted each book as carefully as someone giving up a litter of kittens for adoption, selecting exactly the right match for each gently used paperback.
But just as quickly as I get rid of them, new books find me, and vice versa. I feel it’s my duty as a book lover to buy at least one book from every independent bookstore I visit, and it should be obvious that a bookstore is my first stop in a new town. That’s how I stumbled across Mark Haskell Smith’s hilarious reality TV novel Raw on a table at Portland, Maine’s Longfellow Books. Sometimes the clincher is a phrase or a sentence that lets me know the author is a kindred soul, such as Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack and Honey chapter title, “Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World.”
Instead, I have to comfort myself by arranging the books I hauled to the suburbs, shelving them in ways that may only make sense to me. I love the intellectual symmetry of putting Carol Queen’s essay collection Real Live Nude Girl next to Kathleen Rooney’s Live Nude Girl. In my “too sad to read all the way through” category, Elizabeth McCracken’s An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination rests against Emily Rapp’s The Still Point of the Turning World, where I just added a copy of Elizabeth Heineman’s Ghostbelly.
Because I often write about books, at least three, but often double that, arrive in my mailbox every week—though if they didn’t, I would likely make up for that lack in book purchases. Don’t even get me started on book events like next week’s Book Expo America, where free books abound—I skipped it last year for the first time in twelve years, and am actually a little afraid to attend lest I come home with too many new ones.
Much as I love my book collection en masse, perusing all the titles in different fonts and colors, the mix of YA and mystery and memoir and romance, it’s cracking open a first page and getting swept away that will always captivate me. I can’t apologize for loving books too much. If that makes me a book hoarder, I can live with it.
Tags: books, hoarding, rachel kramer bussel, relationships
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How many books does a person have to own to officially be labeled a book hoarder?…The answer is simple: 1,000 or more.
Uh-oh.
Yeah, I’m sorry, what kind of sad nomad owns 1000 books?
wait, more than 1000 is book hoarding, now?
Shit.
I actually moved to buying mostly ebooks because it frees up shelf-space and still lets me buy books. I read so fast! But I am now on a strict rule – I have to get rid of two books for every 1 physical book I bring in, for the next six months. I don’t need to hold on to books I haven’t read for three years, or broken, damaged books from my childhood.
My only comfort in this whole process is that I donate my books to charity shops, where they will be sold on for 50p to people who want to read them.
They can have my copy of The Blue Sword, stolen from my junior school’s library, damaged beyond repair, when they prise it from my oh right I gave it to my sister.
Ha, I stole The Blue Sword from my fifth-grade classroom library! Well, borrowed and forgot to return, anyway.
As the kids say, this hits me right in the feels. The two-deep shelves in the living room of my “read” books are a reminder of my past (junior high fantasy novels, romances of my 30s), and the equally packed “unread” shelves in my bedroom are a font of possibility.
Of course, I am still running up library fines and am considering doing a Harry Potter re-read, but I just feel better in a house with lots of books.
I also separate my read (living room shelf) books from my to-read (bedroom) books as a point of pride! Every new year I take a picture of my to-read pile as a quasi-resolution and try and focus on reading the ones that have been hanging around for awhile, while I acquire new books at an alarming pace. Just got back from vacation with 10 new books.
1000? That seems low.
I do a book purge every time I move, and it’s always 16 boxes. Always. Don’t know how it happens. But, I give them to the library. Whether the library keeps or sells at a fundraiser, I don’t care. I just want to be able to support books for the masses.
My e-reader has been such a godsend for this reason. I found a (legal, as far as I can tell) site that does free downloads and replaced 900 books immediately, without getting anything I didn’t already have in physical form. Since then I’ve filled up one kindle already and my second is half full. I’ve cleared out over half my bookshelves to charity shops and my flat is so much airier and less cramped looking. The only things I buy in paper copies now are graphic novels or big photo books.
do you want to share that site? 🙂
http://tuebl.ca
It claims it’s legal!! I do buy ‘new to me’ books though, rather than getting them off here, but I’ve replaced most of my library that I’d already paid for once with digital versions. All the sites I’ve found that do ‘dodgy’ versions keep quiet about it, but this one says link to facebook, share this site, etc etc. I haven’t seen any new releases on there.
This site is in no way legal. Any website that offers totally free books that are still under copyright without any subscription fee can’t be legal, because how is money getting to the authors and publishers? Yes, this site is quite brazen about its free books, but all that means is that the owner of the site puts up the books and then makes authors and publishers chase him down with DMCA language before he’ll take the book down . . . only to put it up a while later and force the authors and publishers to do it all over again. Please do not support this site if you are a book lover, I beg you.
Yeah, kindle has been a godsend. But the odds of that site being legal are really, really low, especially if it has new releases. Never say never, I guess, but I can’t think of a site that either big publishers or self publishers participate in that allows free downloads, absent the Kindle Unlimited or Lending Library programs.
agree with genevievenumba4 — odds of this being legal are low. I know you’re acting in good faith here, and also there are a lot of ebook sites that go to a LOT of trouble to look legit, so I am not blaming you at all, but unless the site is one of the Kindle lending programs, Project Gutenberg, or your local library, these are almost certainly not legal ebooks.
Also, guys, please be careful about any ebook site that’s (a) a company you don’t recognize and (b) asks you to create an account/enter a CC number. It is not unusual for identity thieves to use ebooks as “bait” to capture your information.
/PSA
It’s not hoarding, it’s building a library!
(note to hosts: book expo was in June, so you might want to adjust that sentence so it’s more in line with the pub date of this piece?) (And yes, book expo is basically the most dangerous place in the world.)
YEP. I get books from the library just so I have to get them out of my house eventually, which is some help.
I agree with everyone else–1000 seems crazy low. And that’s just physical books right? I mean we aren’t counting the hundred of books on my kindle are we? *nervous laughter* And my complete set of the Baby-sitters club books gets a pass too, right? Those should count as one.
That said I recently purged my shelves of things I am honestly never going to read. At least for my current living situation my goal is to keep my book count less than that of the library I currently work in (which is small–about 4000 volumes).
As a librarian, people always expect me to have gobs and gobs of books in my house, but I only have four shelves. One for fun reads, one for Harry Potter, one for random trivia, and one for cookbooks.
Working in a law library will cure anyone of book hoarding because you learn exactly how good it feels to throw away useless books. We had to do a quarterly purge and would toss approximately a dumpster’s worth of books at a time. We had to do it in the evening after the attorneys had left the building because they would say, “DOn’t get rid of this, I use this all the time!” We would know that they weren’t using it because the case law would have been changed due to new rulings and regulations and if they WERE using the books, they were making bad decisions for their clients.
Due to the “bad law” aspect, we couldn’t give them away, either. They had to go into recycling.
I’m a librarian too, and people are always shocked (SHOCKED!) when I tell them that, no, we’re not going to donate your decades-old science or history texts to charity, we are going to recycle them. Since I’m a YA librarian, a lot of that kind of stuff does end up being recycled into craft projects in my department, but I’m not going to foist them off on unsuspecting members of the public. Poor people deserve access to accurate information too!
My mom was not happy when I told her to throw away the 1964 World Books and various other out-of-date encyclopedias that my grandparents had hoarded. Sorry, Mom! They are worth exactly $0.
(I did, however, keep a set of 1934 Funk & Wagnall’s because they have a really cool art deco design on the spine and they are TINY.)
I have my mom’s book over manners that was published in the 1940s. It is amazingly fun to read out loud at wedding showers.
Because I work in a law library that’s meant to provide a national service (it’s part of the University of London but is funded as a national academic institution, and it’s meant to serve all UK universities), we keep basically everything – yes, old stuff is no longer current law, but people doing their PhDs might need it for research. This is obviously a constant problem.
I would never survive at an archival library.
One of the first things I learned when I started training to be a librarian was How To Get Rid of Books (And Other Stuff). Weeding is essential. And poor idealistic former me thought that librarians should aspire to save everything lololololol
I just recycled a 2002 edition of Health In the Americas (not even the second-most-recent edition, and 2 volumes!) and it felt GREAT.
I work at an undergrad library that for decades was run by people morally opposed to weeding (*retch*), so now I’m gleefully chucking decades worth of worthless books. It’s delightful.
We do still have the old director come in and tisk at our weeding, and she did complain to the dean, but he’s on our side so whatever.
One of my favorite experiences as a baby librarian was a major weeding project at a library where the previous director had not gotten rid of a single book for twenty years. There was only one librarian, and she needed to get the shelves cleared because they were getting new carpeting put in, so she called up the library school and they shipped a van of us up there and we filled a dumpster, a pallet of boxes for donation, and each of us brought home probably fifty pounds of books for ourselves. It was great.
Awwww, everything about this is resonant and perfect! And somehow it’s just extra so since I lost my Brooklyn-bookstore-event virginity to an anthology of Ms. Bussel’s back in ’09. There were cupcakes, IIRC.
That’s 1,000 books per person? Because we have 4 people here so that means we can have 4,000 books, right? Right?
Yes! Because I know for a fact that I have over 500 cookbooks alone, and that is after I donated a giant box to our local library book sale
Also a cure for book hoarding: becoming estranged from your PhD program. I acquired SO MANY books–for seminars, for courses I taught, for quals, for the hell of it because what if I need it someday–and I felt that I had to keep every single one because (a) shouldn’t a PhD candidate have an impressive library and (b) what if I had to teach the book some day in the introductory courses that would inevitably be foisted on me as an adjunct or new hire?
When I jumped that track in favor of more remunerative full-time work, I realized that no one could ever make me teach John Updike or Philip Roth again, and I joyfully cleared out dozens upon dozens of books. (This was easy, because I had books crammed on my huge IKEA shelf two rows deep and had already relegated Least Favorites to the back row on each shelf.) I was gifted a Kindle around the same time, and I am pretty happy with this arrangement. I still buy physical books from brick-and-mortar stores occasionally–that’s important to me–but I’d really rather have digital versions of certain books for searchability or. . . cleanliness. Most of the books I bought for seminars and quals were used and pretty gross, dirty and warped.
Oh, co-sign. I have four boxes of academic books that are ready to leave the house any time I can muster the energy to put them in the car and take them to the donation site. It was so liberating, especially, putting the entire set of Strabo’s Geography in the box. I DON’T HAVE TO WRITE ABOUT THIS ANYMORE OKAY
My parents house 100% definitely has more than 1000 books. It doesn’t count if they’re the 30+ year collection of 6 people, right???
As for my own, I think it’s… more than 200. I don’t know. Much more if you count old children’s books.
Most of those are sitting in my parent’s house, since moving books is heavy and I’m on the other side of the country. In my apartment now I have a micro-collection of maybe 2-3 dozen.
Getting an ereader cut down on my visible book hording. Yes, I now own hundreds of ebooks that I’ll probably never have time to read, but at least they’re not a fire hazard.
1000 is ridiculously low.
I am moving in a month. I hired a moving company made up of employees of an independent bookstore trying to raise a stake to buy out the owner when he retires. I hired them specifically because I figured that, unlike most movers who want to know how many boxes you’re moving (which– how can you know that until you’ve packed?), they would know how to translate linear feet of books into truck size.
And they did. I have 105 linear feet of books. I have no idea how many volumes that is or how many boxes they will fill, but the movers said those and the bookcases are too much for the 16-foot truck, and they will need to bring the big one. (But they also offered me the unadvertised bibliophile rate for it.)
That moving company sounds like the basis for a really terrible, quirky sundance film (that I’ll watch on netflix at 2am).
I’m in the process of moving right now. I have a New York apartment, but I still have 25 boxes of books.
Blast. I really wanted to close those italics, but apparently one can’t post closing em tags in the comments. Oh well.
I did the same exact thing. 🙂
I kind of like how it looks like everyone is whispering about their book collections.
it’s like we’re gossiping at a library
I’m still not convinced. (I’m not at 1000 books yet, though I still have lots from when I was a kid.)
1000 books seems impossibly low to qualify as full-on hoarding. I just did a rough count of a few shelves next to me and I’m getting anywhere from 30 to 50 books a shelf, depending on the volume’s thickness.
I’d estimate I have 1400 books* [edit: I’m wrong: my estimate should have been 700] just in the wall of shelves in our tiny bedroom where I’m sitting, and that’s just the fiction. My archaeology, art history, and history texts and The Fella’s baseball and film books are shelved in the living room, the cookbooks (and a small collection of foodways studies) take up a bookcase just outside the kitchen, and the Shakespeare collection is on its own small bookcase along with DVDs of various productions.
I’m not going to pretend that we don’t hoard books — our collection has outgrown our shelves so that there are stacks and stacks of books that have grown into apparently permanent storage in the bathroom, on table shelves, beside bookcases, milkcrates full under the bed, and a big storage tub of books under a table hidden by a tablecloth — but I don’t think the ~3000 books we keep tidily in place on their shelves and use routinely are the indication that we’re hoarding.
I know this is easy for me to say because I don’t have the psychological stuff behind hoarding, but I just have a certain number of bookshelves, and that’s it. When they get full, I have to get rid of books before getting new ones. Luckily, there is a used book store that likes the kind of stuff I like, so I can generally walk in with ten books and walk out with three. Ish.
I’m the same, my books fill the space I give them. Right now, that’s a couple of shelves plus a stack at the window. More space==more books. I love books, I love reading, but they’re like boyfriends. I don’t need to keep them to remember them.
The only book I really will never get rid of or replace with a ebook copy is Infinite Jest, which I goddamn slogged all the way through when I was 22 and will keep forever as a trophy, like a stuffed duck on the wall.
I once sold or gave away 50m of books, measured in shelves. I haven’t picked them up again, though I am learning to love my Kobo.
It delights me how many people say One Thousand Is Crazy Low.
WOO! Someone else who gets weirdly attached to the copy of a book that they read/own and does not WANT to replace it with a new one or an ebook!!
I held on to one copy of a book after it had literally split in half and I had to use a rubberband to hold it together. I’d read and reread it so many times I’d formed what was almost certainly an unnatural attachment to it! Then I dropped it in the tub and that was the end of that. RIP totally jacked up copy of “Imajica” before they split you into two books!
I also had the same copy of the first horror novel I ever read (at 11 years old) till it basically disintegrated.
That being said – I don’t get to hoarder levels because I lend books out freely and rarely get them back, so that kind of keeps it in check. Somehow that doesn’t bother me the way throwing them out would.
Pretty sure about 50 of my books are at the houses of various siblings AS WE SPEAK.
Also I don’t know what’s going on with the italics, but for the record? I’m into it. /end McPoyle
1000 is definitely low. I think the answer should be “more than you could actually read in your lifetime”. If your to-read pile is over 200 and you’re still rereading old favourites, you may be hoarding. If your to-read pile is 50 books or fewer and you’re still rereading old favourites, you’re probably okay. It’s easy enough to read 50 books in a year, so you could theoretically catch up at some point.
I sold a bunch of books to Powell’s before moving to Boston, and what they wouldn’t take I gave to Goodwill. It’s good, because now I hopefully won’t have to buy like five bookshelves, maybe only four, but it is an unpleasant emotional thing to do and I hate it more than I hate getting rid of other stuff by an order of magnitude.
I think we expats are a special case. I moved to a non-English-speaking country. While I am comfortable with the local language for communication, I never got to the point where reading it is not a chore. So for entertainment reading – i.e., in English – I need to collect books; libraries and local bookstores aren’t an option.
I’ll admit to having BABLE, otherwise known is book accumulation beyond life expectancy, because it would take multiple lifetimes to read everything but one day I’ll finish Dostoyevsky, I swear!
BABLE. This is a great word. I am stealing it immediately.
*eyes creaky, overflowing, overburdened TBR bookcase*
We did a BIG purge of books right before packing to move to New York. We still have more than 1 full Ikea Billy bookcase (don’t know exactly how many books that is– I’ve never counted). One of the main reasons I kept as many books as I did is because if/when my husband and I have kids, I want them to grow up in a house full of books. So much of my knowledge comes from losing myself in every book I could get my hands on, and my parents kept an impressive number of them. I’m wary of replacing my collection with ebooks, primarily because literate children are ~10 years away for us and technology goes obsolete a lot faster than that! The modern-day equivalent of having a library on floppy disks is basically my nightmare scenario.
“The modern-day equivalent of having a library on floppy disks is basically my nightmare scenario.” Thank you for articulating something I have been thinking for awhile but could not put my finger on.
Last time I moved, I gave away, donated, or sold crates and crates of books, some because I would never need them again, some because they’re such classic, common texts that I knew any library would have a copy and I could probably find them online should I ever need them at short notice.
… cut to me a few months later, looking for a specific quote in Dracula. Thanks to my odd memory retention, I know exactly where the passage would be in the copy I used to own, down to the spot on the page, but I can’t remember the phrasing well enough to Google for it or search each online chapter. INFURIATING.
I read plenty of library books, but for texts I’ll refer to and quote often, it’s easier for me to own them because I’ll learn the route through that specific copy the way you learn the road home, and I’ll know every little path and landmark.
That is my only problem with e-books, I can never find the quotes I want, later.
It’s the curse of the not-quite eidetic memory: I can see in my mind’s eye where the passage would be, but I can’t… quite… read it.
Is the edition you had available from Amazon? If so, you *might* be able to use the Look Inside feature to see an image of the page you’re thinking of.
Even if you can’t see the exact page you want– sometimes you have to be logged in with an Amazon account, or sometimes certain pages simply aren’t posted– you may still be able to collect enough key words/phrases to do a more precise search within another version of the text.
I only suggest this because it came in handy a few times for verifying direct quotes or plot points in literary works that were the focus of lesson plans I was editing for an educational publisher.
1000? Hmm. …tries to count…I think I’m in the 500-600 range. Woo. “Collector” sounds safer than “hoarder”, let’s go with that. I do purge books I hate…hoarders don’t do that, do they?
Also: paperbacks from the 50-70s (and sometimes 80s): THE SMELL.
My informal definition of a hoard vs. a collection is whether it’s organized and usable. You could have 2000 books and not be a hoarder (to me, at least) if you basically know what they are, actually will read them, and have a place for all of them.
That said, I am a voracious reader but have less than two full bookshelves. Books either are worth reading over and over, and therefore should be kept, or they were worth reading once or twice and then can move on out of my life so something else can come in. Getting a Kindle and hooking it up to my library’s e-book lending library has been great for letting me investigate new reads without taking custody of a physical object. And now with Kindle Unlimited? Wee dawgies.
“Basically know what they are” – don’t repeatedly find yourself buying/borrowing something that you already own because it was devoured by the hoard.
These italics are making me read everyone’s comments with a dreamy susurrous intensity.
It’s lovely but taxing.
I’ve lost the bulk of my library twice now, and among the reasons I’m desperate to get back into stable housing is to unpack what I have left, without which I find it hard to work, hard to learn, hard to recall things. Having books at hand is just part of my thought process in a way the interwebs never will be.
I've lost the bulk of my library twice now, and among the reasons I'm desperate to get back into stable housing is to unpack what I have left, without which I find it hard to work, hard to learn, hard to recall things. Having books at hand is just part of my thought process in a way the interwebs never will be.
Other than having to stop and retch a bit at reading the name of Katie Roiphe, I totally feel this. In 2010 the apartment I was living in was destroyed by fire and I lost all my books, which was a small blessing in a very traumatic disguise (I was there, sleeping, when the fire started.) Now I keep myself limited to one big shelf and one little shelf, ostensibly to be my “have read” and “to read” collections, though they always end up mixed up. I won’t myself put them two rows deep, but piled on top is just fine.
Other than having to stop and retch a bit at reading the name of Katie Roiphe, I totally feel this. In 2010 the apartment I was living in was destroyed by fire and I lost all my books, which was a small blessing in a very traumatic disguise (I was there, sleeping, when the fire started.) Now I keep myself limited to one big shelf and one little shelf, ostensibly to be my "have read" and "to read" collections, though they always end up mixed up. I won't myself put them two rows deep, but piled on top is just fine.
I know that feeling–I’m currently trying to purge some books in anticipation of living in an apartment, and the ones giving me the most trouble are the books I’ve squirreled away each time I’ve visited my grandparents. I not only love books, I also love old books (more for the aesthetic than the actual reading, unfortunately). So I’m never going to read the ’30s edition of Plato, or my grandpa’s college German textbooks, but I have SO MUCH GUILT trying to get rid of them. I think they’ll probably end up at the library book sale; somehow I feel like people there might give them more love than if I donated them to Goodwill.
A few months back, I cleaned off the bookshelf in my bedroom (let us make no mention of the 100+ books in storage in the basement) with one goal: any book I had already read was going to be packed away. When I was done, there were still two full shelves. There are now three full shelves. The books remain unread.
The problem is, I buy books if they catch my eye and I think they look interesting, but then when I pick out a book to read, I’m not in the mood for a biography/history of Bedlam/psychosexual analysis of fairy tales, so they end of languishing on the shelf until I am. (Also a problem is my setting goals for myself- this year I’ll read 100 books!- which makes me hesitant to pick up the books I know I want to read, but am afraid I won’t read quickly enough.)
My intensely organized LibraryThing account informs me that I own 864 books, which seems low. It’s possible the last round of cataloging was not as thorough as it was meant to be. But I’m also in the middle of a weeding project in preparation for my move in two months (wheee!): every single book gets a priority tag. 1s are books which you will have to pry from my cold, dead fingers. 2s are books that I would be very sad if I ever lost but may never actually get around to replacing if I did. And 3s are books that make me wonder what on earth I was thinking. (Mind that most 3s are not actually going away at this point, they’re going in the reread pile, because I may have been thinking something wise! It’s possible! I’m very forgetful!) I feel terribly organized. I am not actually getting rid of many books.
I thought there was no possible way I owned a thousand books until I went and counted them last night. 🙁 Whoops.
I’m pretty certain (based on a quick count of two large bookcases) that we have more than 1750 books–more than that if I count what’s in our basement. We built in a number of bookshelves when we moved into a house, which made it possible. But we got rid of some 12 boxes, and they keep building up. We love to be surrounded by them. When we moved, the movers said that classified our collection of books as a “library.”
Btw, I was pleased to read that you found a good home for Shooting to Kill, cowritten by my husband, David Edelstein.
only 1,000? Per room, right?
Um, I inventoried my paperback/hardcover fiction shortly before switching to ebooks & came up with over 6000. At this point I’ve never had to move them, maybe if I did the number would go down a little. I also read 2-10 books a day though, so I tend to re-read a lot.
Actually it's legal because the users put the books up and there's a prominently displayed option to take it down. Like YouTube. Their legal page is at http://tuebl.ca/legal and you can read it if you don't believe me.
This makes me feel entirely sane for my ability to edit my collection. If I’ve read a book and REALLY loved it I keep it. If I think it is an okay book, but not so well written that I could read it at least twice more then I donate it to a charity shop or to the classroom of a teacher friend of mine. So, my shelves are full of books I’ve loved, classics, and books waiting to be read. This keeps me sane.
I just stumbled upon this blog and had to laugh – because I ended up buying a house in the suburbs after my friends told me they would *never* help move my library again. The house was the absolute last time. I had more than a hundred boxes then. Now I have more than 8000 books – and still don’t own a Kindle or Nook. I hate the damn things. They’re not comfortable to hold, and I spend all day staring at a computer screen as it is. I am in the process of a purge (at this point, I’ve donated more than 200+ books to Goodwill and Salvation Army), but I also realize some books will never depart my house – and, yes, that would include both the US and British versions of Harry Potter!