How Many Books Do I Own?

[@LuminousLibro]

How many books do YOU own? Are you more of a minimalist and like to keep a small bookshelf? Or are you a collector with carefully curated special editions? Or you do have a house full of books in every room?

[@spookyfamily9602]

lol I would love to count all of my books again. When I moved into my current house 16 years ago, we estimated my collection at around 1000 books. My dad joked that next time I was getting movers for the books. At the time, I had 2 small children that were just starting their own collections and I hadn't yet become a volunteer at my local library bookstore so I think it is safe to say that my house contains similar numbers to yours. I will report back when I have actually counted. :)

[@Bryndisdaugtherofgunnar]

I haven't counted my books, but I am planning on doing it soon, am currently working on re-arranging and organising them. Still, pretty sure I don't have nearly as many books as you. Your book collection/library is goals! 🙂

[@KeenCatChris]

I want to do this so bad! Great idea!

[@TheBookedEscapePlan]

7:22 - "Math, people, just . . . math." Speaking of personal libraries, I've been boxing up my books because I am moving (I think you and I have probably about the same amount of books) and the amount of math books I have is uncountable, but I'm sure that if I pulled them all together, they could fill a full bookcase. I love math. I probably have as many math books as I do poetry. Lots of books full of differentials and problems in topology and matrices and rings & fields and whatnot (I love solving math problems). Though, neither the math nor the poetry probably come close to the amount of classic novels in paperback form I have. Maybe combined they do, but my classic novels, and classics in general, easily make up more than half of my books. I'm not holding a large stock of gift books for anyone in particular like you are for your nieces, but I do have duplicates of personal favorites to gift to people should the occasion arise. I have three copies of Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence," for example, and I own several copies of "War & Peace". I actually wrote a piece on my blog not too long ago about the unique roll duplicates can play in one's own library. And duplicates aside, I gift books out from my library all the time; my friend's favorite composer is Tchaikovsky, and so I gave him a biography I had read about Tchaikovsky for his birthday recently. I have lots of books on music as well, but there's no way I have as many music books as you because I'm not a musician, but merely an enthusiast. There are very specific composers I want to learn, and I pick up sheet music when I can, but I hardly ever see the stuff I want to play in the music sections of stores. What I wouldn't do to have the sonatas of Scriabin for instance, or anything containing Ravel's Concerto for Left Hand, or a big book of Prokofiev's Conertos, Sonatas and the Scythian Suite. Or that Lidberg Concerto 3 he wrote specifically for my favorite living pianist, Yuja Wang, who evidently has identical taste in composers as I do. I recently, finally, found sheet music of Erik Satie's full "Gnossienes" and "Gymnopedies", and I have two of the Norton Anthologies of Classical music - you know, with the spiral binding? I have some of the Gershwins and I have a book of my beloved Chopin, but it doesn't have all of the Nocturnes. (Can you tell I'm piano-oriented of late?) My friend Hannah Joyner - @HannasBooks here on KZbin - and I were bonding through shared favorite composers at the beginning of this month and it has made me think it would do me some good to learn some Copland, since I like him so much. I have plenty of monographs on music theory like Tchaikovsky's book on harmony or Tochs' "The Shaping Forces of Music" or the great music history book, "The History of Musical Style" by Crocker, and biographies. I've just picked up Swafford's biography of Mozart, which I wanted to read the year it came out, but the year it did so, everything was closed, including bookstores, and for good reason, but I did miss a lot of the books I had been looking forward to. John Eliot Garner's biography of Bach has been in my personal library for ages, because I became infatuated with Bach while reading Douglas Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach" and I read books about each of Hofstadter's principle human subjects cand Gardner's book on Bach was one of the books I read. I've always wanted to read Albert Schweitzer's book on Bach, but I never see it anywhere. I've also got a handful of books on jazz music as well as blues, and a few books on independent/indie/underground rock (I grew up in the pacific northwest, so it's in the DNA of my musical formation).

[@LuminousLibro]

That’s so great that you are building a music library little by little!

[@TheBookedEscapePlan]

@@LuminousLibro Yes, very slowly. Do you have a favorite composer?

[@LuminousLibro]

Chopin and Mozart are tied for favorite composer. Then Bach and Brahms.

[@TheBookedEscapePlan]

@@LuminousLibro Excellent choices.

[@TheBookedEscapePlan]

@@LuminousLibro Have you read the Mozart book by Swafford? It's incredibly engaging so far. Your choices are incredible, of course. And as I said, I love Chopin, especially the Nocturnes. I'd have to say Prokofiev and Scriabin are my favorites, I think. And then Erik Satie and Chopin. Two tied pairs to match yours.

[@Narnian78]

I own probably about a thousand books (maybe a little less than that). They are mainly science fiction and fantasy and some on birds and astronomy. There are also guides to nature such as those about the national parks and astronomy. They are mostly books by C. S. Lewis and Tolkien and some old college textbooks. I was an English major in college and I still use my guides to literature for reference. I have a couple on C.S. Lewis that were written by my former professor, who passed away a few months ago.

[@octobergirl3460]

This is actually insane🙀. So many books😭❤️. This made me count my own books which is so less in number but still. I own almost 350 books.

[@kathleencraine7335]

Cool beans, because I love counts! Currently my husband & I have 1,623 physical books on shelves according to LibraryThing. About 600 are his and the rest mine. We also have 163 books packed away (not part of the 1,623) that belong to our adult son living in the UK. LibraryThing is pretty accurate because it allows you to add books by ISBN number. So you can have multiple editions of the same book, as long as it's a different ISBN. You can even list the same ISBN twice; it just warns you that it's a duplicate, but you can add details (like where & when you got it) to distinguish the duplicates. LT allows you to export to a spreadsheet, so last year I did just that and did an "audit" to find every book on the list & books on the shelves that weren't on the list--I ended up adding about 40 books. It took a few days to complete that project. I have recorded all of my textbooks, including my music textbooks & bound scores. I don't record sheet music, but I do record hard bound hymns, folksongs, etc. I also record individual issues of journals--we have many issues of Chicago History Magazine, which comes out quarterly. Right now I have 489 books as TBR; I started 2024 with 542 TBR, so I feel pretty good to see that number go down.

[@LuminousLibro]

That’s really smart to have a spreadsheet! A lot of the antique books that I have don’t have ISBNs, so I have to look them up by title or even create a listing for them on Goodreads or StoryGraph. Such a pain. It would take a lot of work to create a full list of my books! Not sure I want to tackle that.

[@PatriotPoint]

We only have about 500, up until this video I though that was a lot. Very impressive.

[@LuminousLibro]

That IS a lot! Most people have only a handful of books. 500 is a nice home library!

[@High-Spade]

I am a lightweight reader…only about 563 books in my house.

[@outi3852]

We (family of 3) have about 1500 books, about half of them are mine 😅 Nowadays I keep only the books I want to read, I can't really add any more shelf space so some of the books have to leave.

[@MistyMitchell-b5o]

If i counted the books i have I'd go crazy and have to do a huge book un hual