What Size Is Your Library?

Maybe 400 volumes total, between hard copies and digital.

That Ancient Egypt book sounds super interesting. How is it?

 

[ My wife only lets me have seven shelves of books.
I've have perhaps 500 volumes on biblical studies on my shelves.

I've many thousand in digital form on Logos and a few hundred on my iPad Kindle app.

I remember a thread started by Crabby a few years back where he set a goal of reading 60 books in a year.
My comment was something like... that's an awful lot of books.
My New Years resolution was to write down the title of every book I read this year.
I completed twenty in January... and then broke the resolution. Yeah, I read a lot.

Rob

 

Over the years I have made some inefficient and ill-advised attempts to catalog my library -- which all went down incomplete and in defeat. A few years back I discovered LibraryThing.com and started entering books into it. There probably are better programs, but this surpassed any attempts I made in the past. I have most of my books entered into it, with the exception of my "minutes books" collection and probably some books I have packed in boxes and have forgotten about. My little office doesn't have enough space to shelve my books.

According to Library Thing, I have 1488 books entered into it. Don't know whether that is a lot or not. A lot of books I have are not "sit down and read" books, but for specific research and certain collections. In addition to the minutes books collection, I have a fairly large collection of hymn and tune books (song books), and quite a lot of Baptist history. Very few of my books are fiction. My library, I suppose, is somewhat odd -- in the sense that I don't have scores of books that show up in many other Library Thing libraries (the program shows these stats) and a lot of the books show up as only owned by me (that is, comparing Library Thing users).

I don't like to read books on a computer, but I use electronic books and search features a lot for doing research nowadays.

I just finished reading Washing the Feet of the Saints: Theology, History, and Practice, by Jeremy Kamer. This is a topic of specific interest to me and I sometimes buy random books on the subject. This one is short, not in depth, but might be a good introduction for someone (but has quite a few printing errors). I started reading The Seeds of Injustice, an historical novel in a Civil War setting (a Christmas gift) by Micheal E. Jimerson. Recommended by a friend and pretty interesting, although it is not the type of book I would buy myself.

 

When I purchase a ranch in Eastern Colorado near Ramah or Calhan I plan on adding a library addition onto the house that will be 40 feet long and 20 feet wide and will have library shelves from floor to ceiling with ladders on rails attached to the shelves to retrieve books just like in some of the older public libraries.

 

I had a very large library that I loved very much. But we're downsizing and most of the material is available on the internet now so I donated it to our church.

Mostly, I just kept the cookbooks and books about music.

 

Why downsize? I believe that having a lot of books and a lot of other material possessions is very important as well as having a large house.

 

I wasn't using it. It was taking up space. The information is all available on the internet. And I decided it would be a valuable resource for our church.

I've sold off all but three of my pinball machines and coin ops and over 1,000 CDs. About the only thing I'm not willing to part with are my guitars and my tools.

I'm getting older and having the biggest collection of things on the block just isn't interesting to me anymore. I just want to wake up, take the dogs out, fish or play golf, maybe tennis, come home, take a nap, and then go out with my friends.

No point in having a bunch of books locked away where they're not benefitting anybody.

As for having a large house, our house was fine when we had seven kids at home. All but two of them are on their own now and the house is too big. Just more space to gather dust.

 

When I do acquire a large collection of books, a large collection of recordings(Vinyl Records, 8 Track Tapes, Cassette Tapes, Compact Discs, Reel to Reel Tapes), Videos(VHS, Beta, Laserdiscs), stereo equipment(Stereos with radio, turntable, 8 Track Tape Recorder and stereos with radio, turntable, Cassette Recorder, Compact Disc Recorder/Player and a Reel To Reel Tape Recorder) and video equipment(VHS Recorder and Laserdisc Player) I will never get rid of them even when I get old. And thus I will need a large house to house all those material possessions.

 

Your prerogative, I guess.

 

About 400, all on Bible software!

 

As a young Christian we always need a bit of help, well here is a place where you can download free Christian assorted literature and it even directs you to places that you can study for free, one Baptist and the other non-denominational!

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