Your library?

[Loddfafner]

I have seen bookstores with fewer books, but Ullarsskald may have me beat. In my own home I count only 15 bookcases, plus a couple of stray shelves, boxes, and piles. What is stored elsewhere might fill up another 6 or 7 cases though.

[Ulf]

Mine could probably fill 1.5 to 2 of the bookshelf in Germanicus' picture, though I recently went and removed all the books I consider garbage from my library, so maybe less. I'm really picky about my 'collection' and the only ones I really consider apart of it are old literature and philosophy books.

[Osweo]

Alright....count them:

COUNT them?! Good Gods, Man, I'm itching to bloody organise them! Shame on you for the boody state of that lot!

***

When I was in my late teens we had a house with huge built in book cases in the dining room, and I loved to arrange my better looking books there, taking due consideration for height and colour...

I also had plenty of shelves full elsewhere of paperbacks and penguin classics and the like. I occasionally counted them for curiosity's sake, and it was well over fifteen hundred at least.

Years of travelling about since then have added hundreds more books, but have also resulted in them being shoved unceremoniously in a few dozen cardboard boxes in a storage room at my Dad's business...

ONE day, they will all be brought out again into the light... Hopefully in my lifetime.

I have a good cupboard and a half full of Russian ethnography, history and folklore, including the complete works of Lev Gumilyov. The Thames and Hudson 'ancient peoples and places' series is an especial favourite, and I have any number of books of the collective Lore of the peoples of these Islands...

I toy with the idea of being buried with them all, Tutankhamun style, should my heirs prove to be uncultured louts (it happens to the best of fathers, unfortunately).

[Liffrea]

Originally Posted by Osweo
COUNT them?! Good Gods, Man, I'm itching to bloody organise them! Shame on you for the boody state of that lot!

Lol, believe it or not they are actually organised into categories, English history, history, Anglo-Saxon/Germanic/Celtic, literature, philosophy, science, heathenism, science-fiction/fantasy, Tolkien and Pratchett. There are odds and ends around but I know where everything is, I read and write most days so I don’t always put things away….

[Octothorpe]

I've not counted lately, but when the wife and I married we merged two rather large collections--several thousand volumes of assorted hardbacks, paperbacks, folios, sequential art, usw. We've decided that when we finish the basement (now it's just concrete and wood), it's going to be a library/bar combo. Drinking and reading!

[Osweo]

Lol, believe it or not they are actually organised into categories,

Deary me...
How drearily functional!

Pratchett.

I have everything he wrote up until ... oh, what was it - 'The Hogfather', perhaps. He wrote more but I'd rather grown out of it by then. I've got a PC game of his inspiration, and the 'companion' and two maps too. Half a dozen or so are hardbacks, and one is signed.

The reason I bring it up is this; I've got them all in one box, and am not particularly bothered about keeping them - how much do you reckon I could ask for the lot? I've never done things like Ebay before, and am not really familiar with how things are done there, but do you reckon I might get a bit of money for them as a set, or should I get rid of em one at a time? Or should they go straight to the Age Concern shop?

[Ulf]

I have seen bookstores with fewer books, but Ullarsskald may have me beat. In my own home I count only 15 bookcases, plus a couple of stray shelves, boxes, and piles. What is stored elsewhere might fill up another 6 or 7 cases though.

I was like a kid in a candy shop when I saw your lair full of books. The only thing that kept me from ignoring everyone and looking through them was the whiskey.

[Óttar]

I do not have a bookshelf at the moment, but a number of books are piled high upon my computer desk, still more fill a suitcase. Here's a taste:

Barron's French vocabulary,
same's French verbs,
a book on Scots Gaelic,
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook,
The Encyc. of American Criminal Law,
Dover Recognition of Shakuntala,
Dover - Nibelungenlied (trans.)
Learner's Hindi-English dictionary,
Waterman's History of the German Language,
Disease, Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland (had to read it for my B.A. thesis, its extraordinarily dry),
Teach Yourself Sanskrit,
the Oxford Duden unabridged German Dictionary,
Flaherty's Hindus: An Alternative History,
The Devi Mahatmya,
the Sri Lalita Sahasranama,
The Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit, Romanised Sanskrit, and English translation, with detailed explanation of almost every point of grammar,
Oxford Upanishads,
Bengalischen Balladen,
Brewer's Dict. of Phrase and Fable,
The Affected Provincial's Companion,
Tzu's Art of War,
The Laws of Manu (manusmirtidharmashastras),
The Normans,
The Basic Writings of Nietzsche,
Learn Latin,
Learn Greek,
A Year amongst the Persians,
The Greeks in India,
Women's Religions in the Ancient World,
Offering Flowers-Feeding Skulls: Bengali Goddess Worship,
Thus Spake Zarathustra,
Kaufman's Bilingual Edition of Goethe's Faust,
Bilingual French Short Stories,
The History of the Spanish Language,
God against the Gods: History of the War between Monotheism and Polytheism,
A Detailed Account of Hindu and Muslim Castes, Occupations, and their Manners of Dress,
Sex With the Queen,
Sex Lives of the Popes,
Brave New World,
the Doors of Perception,
1984,
Animal Farm,
the Volsung Saga,
Budge's Egyptian Book of the Dead with Egyptian hieroglyphs, Romanised and English Translation...

I also have a number of ebooks including:

the Iliad,
Odyssey,
the complete Mahabharata,
Grimm's Teutonic Myth,
Apuleius' the Golden Ass,
The Works of Emperor Julian the Apostate,
the Works of Plotinus,
Selected Works of Porphyry,
Hislop's The Two Babylons: An Expose of Popery (Awesome Stuff),
Albert Pike's Morals and Dogma of the Freemasons (1,500 pages),
Aurelius' Meditations,
the Ramayana,
Jung's Red Book etc.

I just recently received (unopened as of yet) two boxes of books from my aunt. I have a number of books at my other aunts house and still yet many at my mom's house. It would be near impossible to recount them all... I am working on getting all 4 of the Vedas (truly monumentous works).

[Pallantides]

I have about 200 books myself, my parents used to have a large library in their old villa with many books from the 19th century, the oldest book was a bible from 1750.

[Osweo]

By the way, for those intent on bulking up their Bibliotecque, I should recommend one of the bookshops in Horncastle in Lincolnshire; half the shop is devoted to an astounding offer; 'Three Books For a Pound'! There's some shit on the shelves, as in every second hand bokshop, but some real gems too! It's impossible to leave without a carrier bagfull, I can vouch!

Chatting with the woman inside (delightfully unPC she is too) I asked if they had any Russian stuff they might like to get rid of. She said she'd look in their store room at home, so I came back a few days later. She had a huge box of Bulgarian books! I can almost read that language, so I bought the lot.