The Library on the Wall

[Writer44]

Great article in the Wall Street Journal today about a guy who loves books and drags them with him to every place he's lived and just can't give them up for a variety of reasons.

I took a moment to look around my own house and realized that I have various walls covered with books in most every room. Each one is a harbinger of information or entertainment or doom. Kind of fun to visit them and wonder, "What was I thinking when I put this one up there."

Anyone care to comment on their own collections?

 

[KingFishFan15]

I tend to keep most of our books in one room. We have turned the smallest bedroom in our house into a library of sorts. I have them organized by genre and mixed in are various collectible items.

 

[Champagne]

I ran out of bookshelf space some time ago and have books piled up everywhere as well as on shelves. We had this wonderful notion to arrange the books alphabetically, but now we have bookshelves in the basement, in the living room, and in a couple of the spare bedrooms, it's been too much trouble lugging books up and down all those flights of stairs, so they've been left sort of random. As long as they're vaguely sorted by subject matter, that's probably about as far as we'll ever get. It does make for interesting times if I'm trying to find a particular book though.

 

[Peach]

similar to kingfishfan15 here.. we turned the second largest bedroom into the 'library' in our house, altho it's full. the bookcases line the walls and are double stacked, and i have books stacked in between bookcases as well.. if you stack books with books as shelves too, it works as long as i don't actually try to prise any of them out.. lol.. i keep buying books tho, so one day there will just be no way i can fit any more in..

 

[SeoulMan]

I have a cousin who loves the PHYSICAL aspect of books so passionately that she buys clean/new copies of books for her private bookshelves but never touches them. Then, she reads the library copies just so she won't wreck the bindings on the books in her collection. Nutty.

 

[sparkchaser]

My library is ever growing. I began my home library in earnest after college and since then I have only given away about 20 or so books, most of which were from my High School days. The books are pretty much limited to one room which I have made into the library. There are a few books upstairs but the bulk in is the one room. I can't imagine being without my books.

 

[joderu95]

For a long time I wanted to keep everything we had, whether or not it was good or bad. Then things began to get crowded and we had to learn how to detach. I'm thankful for it too everytime we move. We've sold hundreds of books back to Powell's in Portland, donated dozens to the Salvation Army and given some to relatives. This has come back to bite me once or twice though as I've had to re-buy books. It does not bother me that much though because books are a thing we've always spent heavily on. Right now we are still far beyond our bookshelf capacity (and probably always will be) with a couple hundred more stored in totes.

 

[Lady Reader]

It's posts in this thread and the guy's article that makes me realize I don't have as many books as my husband seems to think, or that I want. I buy them faster than I can read them, so have to put a ban on buying more. I have four IKEA bookcases filled with books, but it looks so minuscule comparatively.

 

[sparkchaser]

Just remind your husband that it could be worse, much worse.

 

[pontalba]

I'm not sure how many books I have, not as many as I'd like. A rough guess is about 4,000, with approximately 600 in the TBR stack. I'd love to have all books in one room, but I can't seem to organize that, and have about half of my books in the computer room, and then bookcases down the hall both upstairs and downstairs, and the odd bookshelf around other areas.

I rarely get rid of a book, I used to trade paperbacks at the local second hand store, but mostly keep them now. Said second hand store sells hardbacks for 1.75 USD, so I check there to see if they have hardbacks of certain paperbacks I already have, then I can trade in that paperback.