Thirty years ago when I was moving and the moving company estimator came in and looked at my books, I said "I have ton of books." He looked and said "Yes, you do." And I hardly had any books then...

I counted my bookcases and shelf length in 2004 (I only added a couple since then). At the time I had 5 small bookcases in the living room corner (fantasy and other paperbacks); 7 very tall bookcases in the dining room/library holding history (mostly medieval Britain, shelved by time period and/or location), King Arthur (fiction/history/lit), historical fiction (by year of story), and some miscellany; 4 bookcases in my office/computer room holding music and computer books; 5 bookcases in the upstairs study holding science and higher education books; one in the bedroom; and one in the other unused bedroom (study is also supposed to be a bedroom); for a total of 23 bookcases and 260 linear feet. I have moved some of them around since I retired and need different collections in different places and then Dick moved in (we had been commuting for 20+ years). I am currently trying to organize our joint music book collection that runs 15 shelves.

Most of my bookcases come from Ikea, with their better grade of bookcases in the dining room and their cheaper ones in my office. Some are hand made. A friend's boyfriend was a carpenter and I said I was thinking of buying some bookcases and said what they would cost. He took the bait and said, "I can make them for you cheaper than that."

At some point I had started cataloging the books in askSam, the same database we use for the Digital Tradition. I did not get terribly far and at some point when I got a new computer I failed to copy that file. I recently bought a cheap program called Book Collector that presumably looks up and enters all of the book information from the book number, but I have not yet opened the program to see whether it works.

I do take some books to the second hand paperback store, but come back with more than I dropped off. It is so hard to part with books, even such useful, current books as molecular biology from 1970...