Sunday, February 24, 2008

2.24 Librarything

I crossed the 1000 book mark in entering my personal library this weekend. I've been working on this project off and on for a bit over a year (?). I think I'm about a quarter done -give or take a few hundred books. A rough guesstimate at the number of books on the shelves, multiplied by a more exact count of the number of shelves, plus a wild-ass swipe at estimating the number of books still in boxes... K thinks we counted up 8000 books before we moved, but somehow I don't think that's right. I don't think I've had that many since I moved from MD to CA when I had about 10000.

[When I was being moved by my new company from MD to CA, they asked how much stuff I had to move. I gave them an estimate on rooms, furniture, etc, and then mentioned that they needed to know I had about 10000 books, most of them paperback. The woman I was talking to, said "uh-huh". She apparently told the moving van person "5000 books". He said "uh-huh". And came prepared to pack 1000 books. I said "uh-huh". And showed him my collection.
One of the interesting sidelights on this little thing, which I found out afterwards, was that there actually was a weight limit on how much they were willing to move without my having to pay for excess. Nobody bothered to mention this since I was a single person with about a one-bedroom apartment's worth of furniture. With my books, I came within a few hundred pounds of the limit. I did a lot of culling in the next few years, and when J and I got married I only had about 4000 left. I try to cull more often now. At the moment I'm using paperbackswap to cull with which isn't exactly reducing the total number of books in the house...]

K also pointed out that at my current rate of progress (1000 books per year) cataloging them this way will only take me somewhere between 3 and 7 more years. I told her I didn't need to hear that right now.

My fiber books (most of them) are here.

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