About 4x the number that will fit on shelves in our library area of same.
This is a job we’ve postponed since moving here. We’ve tried about everything to figure how to sort this mess, but I think Jane is onto it. Three quarters of them have to go (to a library charity) and unfortunately a large proportion of the wrong books are occupying the shelf space. So Jane is clearing about 3 shelves for ‘this has to stay,’ which lets us sort forward and discard as we go.
It’s kind of like lawn mowing tall grass in one sense—that first you have to create a place to set the mower.
It’s a good winter project.
Right now it’s pre-winter gardening. Getting the wisteria trimmed back and the green trash filled before they do the last collection.
Peace, everybody.
I feel your pain. I’ve been putting this task off for about 20 years. Despite having three times the space I used to, I still cannot get everything even close to being on the shelves and have already gone through three culls of the books so that it has reached the no more can be got rid of…and there are always new wonders wanting to be added.
A couple evenings ago as I was lying on the couch watching TV, in a “spare moment” I started counting all the books I could see (without craning my neck over the back of the couch). After 60 or so I decided “a lot”.
The proper measure of books is in linear feet. When I moved to my present address over 20 years ago there were 40 boxes. I have no current count, but when I say I don’t buy titles until they come out in mass market pbk for reasons of space, people tend to believe me.
Memo to self: Install the earthquake brackets on the 4×8 bookcases or come The Big One something will get squished.
Has anybody figured out the R value of a well-stuffed bookcase? Maybe we can justify biblio-hoarding as an energy conservation measure…
Various grand houses in England actually did state the libraries had good thermal retention property
If you all lived closer, we’d send you off with boxes of books like Slime Queens of Vega, Calculus for the Hopeless and the Reader’s Digest condensed Ceremonial Giving of the Trobriand Islanders.
LOL! All of us, I reckon, have oddball books that we have kept past their use-by dates for whatever reason. My contribution would likely be ‘Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout’, or an ancient O’Reilly Linux programming book.
I have a “water atlas” for the US. If you want a map of drainage basins, or hardness, or even general rainfall levels, it’s good.
I lay mine flat; I can get more on each shelf that way. Sometimes I go for two layers, front and back.
A good collection of books is like a garden. You have to weed it on occasion.
I have a complaint! When I moved into my house, I had my husband build floor to ceiling bookshelves, all tailored to fit paperbacks. I have several other bookshelves built to house paperbacks. Then shelves to fit encyclopedia (can’t bear to throw that out – I don’t care how obsolete they are) and also shelves to fit odd-sized books of any flavor. My complaint – WHY did publishers change the size of the paperback? And not to any standard either. TOTALLY frustrating which is why some of my paperbacks are falling apart – the newer ones won’t fit on the shelves! So I have them on my Kindle – but I much prefer reading and holding a nice paperback and certain books I love in hardback. The Kindle is nice in that I don’t have to wait a year for the paperback – but still. I miss my paperbacks!
For shelves deep enough to do double duty I’ve got the back row of books standing up, then put a row of paperback in front, lying down with their spines up. That way I don’t forget what’s in the back row and can usually recognise the book I want from the top bit of the spine that’s visible.
what I do with the paperbacks is I lie them on their side, with the bottom facing out, so they occupy a narrow place on the shelf and then I stack them up high. This works well with prolific authors whose books were all published in the same size. If there are some left over I shelve them normally so I can tell whose books are lying flat. Sometimes, though, for really prolific authors, I lie them flat with the title edge out, and then I can stack another set in front. this makes it difficult to just pull a book off the shelf when you want it but it does permit me to keep about three times as many books as I have normal shelf space for.
And just for relaxation after the stress of last week, here’s some early-autumn weekend cycling . I wish you could have someting like that over there, it’s such an easy way to keep exercising, low impact and everything; but with the kinds of traffic and street-design I’ve seen from the USA it is way too dangerous, I guess.
But when it’s too rainy and windy to be nice biking weather, and I can’t go out myself, just watching these videos by BicycleDutch helps me relax; so maybe that’ll work for some here in the Wavy Navy too.
Nothing happens, there’s no specific point to make, it’s just people going about their ordinary business but it still has a calming influence, at least it does on me.
If you want more, check out his “Biking Dutch” playlist.
I’m not sure I mentioned that I watched the videos you posted before. I enjoyed them a lot.
Thanks, Walt. Makes me feel less like a fool for posting about my own enthousiasms.
We ALL like enthusiam!
As that playlist is rather long, here are my personal favorites: 7 (babies), 13 (women), 73 (kids cycling to school), 16 & 33 (street-organ and explanation), 17 (for being glad I’m inside and dry), 20 (heather), 40 & 85 (was part of my daily route to highschool, though otherwise rather boring unless you like people-watching as it’s all filmed from the same viewpoint), 53 (fall colours), 54 (woods & birdsong), (56 just for the silliness), 57 (dunes & sea, no music), 58 (shopping), 89 (weekend cycling, no music, a bit more landscape), 94 (snow), and finally 30 (Christmastime).
Watching tip: what I like best about the shopping by bike video compilation is that it has several examples of the tight-skirt-hop to start (at 0:36, 1:06, 1:25), which is only used by (usually elderly) ladies who learned to bike while wearing pencil skirts. It’s a slowly dying art, unless those tight, non-stretchy skirts make a comeback – I can’t reliably do it, myself, as I get my feet tangled up.
OK, shutting up now and going to sleep.
At least in the neighborhoods you can cycle, and people do, on the arterials, which puts a lot of trust in the sanity and skill of your fellow man…We also occasionally have bike races. But where we live, on a 5 house strip between two arterials—not so much. Here in Spokane, however, you’re within reach of skiing and snowshoeing, or kayaking. A lot of outdoor activity hereabouts. I think however we may get our exercise this winter shoveling.
I have one built-in bookshelf where a door was changed to a different part of a room, leaving a shallow stub at the end of a hallway that I turned into my paperback collection. It makes the blind end of that hall look much more inviting.
I have a four day weekend, thanks to some unusual scheduling and Veterans’ Day observances. My exercise will be replacing the support posts for our carport, wood posts with concrete pillars. I started detaching the wood connectors and discovered my timing was very good; termites had already made inroads to the untreated parts of the posts. Begone, bugs!
I’ve used some creative ways to increase the surface area available for bookshelves. I have two bookshelves set at right angles to the door into my office, which is the only way you’ll get six bookshelves into a 9 x 10 bedroom with a wide closet opening. I could increase this to eight bookshelves by putting two more bookshelves back to back against the two that are at right angles to the door.
( https://theowlunderground.wordpress.com/2016/09/08/two-down-six-to-go/ )
You could also take a lesson from the cortex of the human brain and put two back to back bookshelf at right angles in between two bookshelves that are parallel to the wall.
Or you could do as you are doing and thin the herd.
Because of limited space, I have bitten the bullet and made it a hard and fast rule to keep no books I’m not interested in rereading a second time.
Does the rule work? I try not to buy books I won’t read a second (and third and fourth) time, and as a result I have ONLY several hundred books crammed in double layers on four shelving units . . . and yes, I reread them all. While falling in love with new books, and adding them to the library. How do people live without books?
Finally settling in in a new rental. The ‘camping in a mansion’ phase ended roughly 6 months ago when said mansion finally sold, followed by ‘GET A GARDEN IN AT THE NEW PLACE CUZ I CAN!’ I’m now in the ‘clear that storage unit before I go broke’ phase~ :/ and the next step is build some shelves so I have some place to stash all the stuff thats been in storage for 2 years. Well, the stuff thats not getting culled anyway. EVERYTHING including dust bunnies and old hairballs was poorly packed into the storage units thanks to inept cleaning company employees. One box that almost made me cry was about half a dozen hardcovers, including a couple Foreigner books and some Dresden, as well as an out of print Bonsai book that currently sells for about $175 online and about 2 dozen paperbacks. They were all singed and smoke damaged, some also with water damage.
Sigh… I still haven’t found a few favorites, the inept cleaning company employees may very well have decided the ratty old copy of Sunset Gardens and a few wildlife guides were not important enough to save and just tossed them. They DID toss quite a few things that I rescued, but I couldn’t watch everything going into the dumpster…
WOL’s idea, which I interpretted to suggest sticking bookcases back-to-back perpendicular to a wall, gave me a quiet chuckle. Mathematically, that’s a way of getting infinite boolshelving! Problem solved! 😀
So here’s how to get infinite book shelving in a room: Start with bookcases filling each of the four walls. Eventually you run out of shelf space! Take each bookcase, break it in the middle and stick a pair of back-to-back bookcases out perpendicularly into the room. Every time you run out of shelving, repeat that process. The algorithm continues indefinitely, creating infinite bookcases in the room! 😀 It makes a “space-filling” fractal, an infinitely long line within a defined perimeter. 😉 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-filling_curve
(Shades of Heinlein’s, “He built a crooked house”.)
And your cell phone likely uses one for its antenna.
You know Aspies can be a little “different”, don’t you? 😀 😀 😀
Moving house can be good for this activity. when we moved to Australia in 1999, Pickfords shipped 75 boxes of books with us, and that was after we’d had a major cull – or we thought it was major, subsequent iterations proved that we’d only really just squeaked out of ‘minor’.
Fortunately for the bookshelves in this house (London houses generally have much smaller rooms than Australian houses – “boundless plains to share”), we moved twice more before shipping 15 book boxes back!
I’ve been culling too, selling, donating and giving to friends using WOL’s yardstick, but the to-read seems to grow MUCH faster than the “this has somewhere to go” pile. Right now I have two back-to-back shelves with two levels of books each, another in the corner (mostly my dad’s token collection) plus two more shelves too jammed to really parse. Yes, bad for the books and the shelves. My beloved’s house was small and full to start with, so I carved a one-room (yep, 9X10) office out of what I’d had formerly as a 10X 13 office and 32 feet of shelf space plus.
Having had a library with a number of mid-room shelves, I can offer one modern suggestion: get 6500k CFL lighting, if you have to clip shoplights and spots to the shelf-tops. One of the banes of libraries is really rotten lighting because the shelves obscure the room lighting.
Likewise, figure out a shelving system, if you haven’t. I find because of the ‘moveable’ characteristic of a library often referenced that something else may have filled the slot before the book gets back. So my library, when I have it organized, is by broad categories, so that if I want a book on Greece—it’s in the History lot in the little grouping that is Greece. Ie, it’s not Dewey Decimal, it’s CJ’s estimation of what I’ll look for when I want it.
Or it’s up in the ‘what idiot designed a book to be 12″ x 8″?’ area, top shelf.
When my SF&F grew beyond three bookcases I finally alphabetised them by author, but the single romance & humor bookcase is still grouped the old way, by ‘reading feel’ (when I feel like this I want to read these kinds of books; or, reading these books give me this similar kind of feeling), and so are the two cases of detectives and mysteries – a system that’s incomprehensible to anyone else, but works well for me.
Non-fiction is grouped by subject, with the case they’re in determined by locality – cookbooks, gardening books, plant and animal recognition books, household tips and general reference (dictionaries, atlas, kids encyclopedia) downstairs near the kitchen; computerbooks, hobbybooks, any and all how to make things books go near my desk upstairs; and artbooks go in the one extra-high shelf with the atlasses.