Patrice Lewis posts Book hoarders? Oh please and links to a repost of a 2017 article 10 famous book hoarders.
Lewis tut-tuts the definition of book hoarder as someone who has over 1,000 books (she and her family have about 1,750, she estimates).
I don’t include hoarder on my scale of book ownership. I tend to think of the scale this way:
- Normal person: Up to, what, 20 books? Although this normalcy is fading.
- “Likes books”: A couple hundred. If they’re arrayed by color or to match the room, she’s a “decorator.”
- Collector: A couple thousand, but carefully selected and thematic.
- Accumulator: Up to 15,000, but far more eclectic.
- Professor: 15,000+.
We’re definitely in the “Accumulator” range. I have 3000 books logged in my laggy Access-based desktop database from the year 2000 and more than that unread/unlogged; my wife has maybe five bookshelves of books plus two built-ins; my boys each have two bookshelves; I have a bookshelf full of practical books in the garage; and we have a couple boxes of children’s books for the next generation in the garage as well. So maybe 9,000 or 10,000 total.
The linked article mentions one of the “hoarders” accumulates 175 to 200 books per year. Ah, gentle reader, that is three or four book sale bag days for me.
The “hoarders” in the article also have dedicated libraries, and that’s still a dream of mine. Man, when we moved to Nogglestead lo, those many years ago, we had enough room to space out and organize our library. But that was several thousand books ago.
