h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

... of books do you have?

If you take a quick look here:
http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/brunel/A87830814
You might notice that I dismissed those bookends as not particularly interesting. However, they're sitting on a bench in the workshop and, seeing them this morning, I was overtaken by a strange emotion...

We have about ten yards of books in the house (I'm assuming, though not certain, that we brought all we had with us when we emigrated).

I doubt if that's anywhere near a record or even notable but it occurred to me to ask


?

Probably 30 yards, although some are in boxes rather than on display

You shouldn't ask questions like that of people who are a bit fixated about counting things. I've now had to wander around the house with a tape measure... I've got 33 yards on shelves. There are also about half a dozen boxes of children's books up in the roof which I am NOT going to go and measure.

Don't know about 30 yards however what's your most pressious/oldest/favourite book.

Well...only three longish shelves of about 2.5 yards each. But some of those are double rows of books, and some of them have vertical stacks on them, so it's a lot more books than the 7.5 yards the shelves measure.

But there are probably more in boxes and assorted piles around the place than on the shelves. I can't quite picture in my head how far they'd stretch if lines up neatly. I think I'd get a bit of a surprise, though.

I have about four yarns to the yard but where will it all end . Nowadays you have to include ebooks & the like

Ah, the roofspace, must be lots... Didn't think about that. Thought dismissed - no way I'm going up there nowadays...

Hmm. Not going into favourites etc. either, except:
Leather bound, worn, faded, stained, gold edged leaves: The Works of William Shakespeare. Inscribed :
To Marjory
13 . 9 . 25
from Uncle Bob
- no, I don't know who...

Just sitting here in the 'study', looking at the shelves, readable spines: (not the woody stuff)
Richard Dawkins: The Ancestor's Tale
James Gleick: Chaos
: Math - oh, and again on another shelf
Stephen Jay Gould: Wonderful Life
Trevor Bayliss: Clock This
Toynbee: A Study Of History
A full foot's worth of CA Visual Objects / Database / OOP ... programming, (must be ripe for outing)


Ah and yes, 'Christchurch: Beyond The Cordon' (Police photographers' pictures after the earthquake, published & sold for charity).

I wish you hadn't asked. In terms of tree books, hubby and I have about 43 yards of books between us. (Makes hugs a bit difficult!)

If you add e-books... I don't want to think about it, but I'll try to work it out. I have about 18 'Complete works' by various authors, and over 120 books in total. Allowing an average of 20 books on a 30 inch shelf, that would be at least 6 shelves worth. That's 180 inches or 15 feet or 5 yards. I think hubby has around 40 e-books, so that's another 5 feet of books - call it 2 yards.

So the total of tree-books and e-books in our household is at least 50 yards.

Now I *really* wish you hadn't asked!

Books is really difficult to measure because they are in spread all over the house. I have just under a yard of cook books in the kitchen. The Discworld series takes up a yard of it's own. Then there's my bedroom, the spare room, my 'home office. I have some in boxes in my garage (NO! I CAN'T get rid of them!).

My Kindle (possibly the worst thing that I ever bought) takes up about half an inch.

Do maps count? I have masses of those!

I have about 15 yards of CDs. That's easy since they are all in the same place and in order. How else would I find what I want?

PP.

We have several yards of No.1 Son's CD/DVDs & I've never checked

Aha! You have those yards in order.
What order? By Title? Author? Subject? Murder/Mystery/Suspense, or what?

What order are Your books in, folks?

On moving in (5+ years ago) our books will probably have been shelved by, say, the foot. Within each foot, they would have been in their previous order but with two of us unloading/shelving, there's no saying what happened - L,R,L,R,L or something else maybe.

Our books are roughly sorted into mine, hubby's and 'ours'. The joint-owned books tend to be reference works, anything from dictionaries to travel guides. We each have bookcases that contain our own books and we're responsible for the order we store our own books. That's easy for hubby as most of his are travel. For me it's a bit more complicated, so here goes:

My travel books are mostly grouped according to continent. There's no particular order to my fiction, but I tend to put all the books by a given author together. Hardbacks and paperbacks are shelved separately. History is in approximate chronological order, starting with Ancient Egypt and ending with the Second World War. Again, hardbacks and paperbacks are shelved separately, in this case because some of the hardbacks are a lot taller than the paperbacks. There's no particular order to my natural history books. There are a couple of narrow bookcases that contain books that don't fit into the above categories, or don't fit into the appropriate bookcase.

Oh, and I've just had a look at Rod's bookends. He might not find them interesting, but I do. I love wooden items, particularly if they're nicely carved, made of unusual wood or have a nice grain. Unfortunately I'm not sure I have room for them, otherwise I'd take them off his hands. (Yes, I have lots of books, but they're all in bookcases and I don't have room to display any more ornaments. )

I'm kind of compulsive about reading books [who else would tackle the entire Pratchett Disc World series in less than a year, while also reading many non-Pratchett titles? ], but I return almost all of them to the library I borrowed them from. The books I actually own would fill about 6 yards of shelving. They're an odd mix: about a third are cookbooks, another third are odds and ends that I've written or composed [a lot of music scores], and the rest include pretty much the entire series of "Pogo" comic strip reprints.

If I don't count the gibbelworters I have about 42 give or take a bobelfluckenhamster.

paulh, if I had a decent library within easy reach, I'd use it. The local library is in the village hall, isn't open at reasonable times and doesn't have a great selection of books. The nearest other library is four miles away. That's one reason why I have so many books.

I hear you . I'm such a pack rat that I wouldn't *dare* try to hoard a lot of books. It's bad enough that I hoard so many other kinds of things.