My index of "books on hand" that I made some years ago, and kept pretty well updated for a few years, does contain 2147 books; but probably fewer than 100 are anything resembling current (the last 100 years?) fiction or social/political stuff. I gave up on trying to keep the list up when Lin & I merged our collections (i.e. started piling them on top of each other 'cause they wouldn't fit on the 380 lineal feet of shelves we had at the old place). She may possibly have had more books than I did, but lots of hers are small paperback heaving-bosom trash (but don't tell her, since she has a different opinion).

I have been engaged in the overly ambitious project of scanning some of the "personally significant" ones to pdfs, so that we can have some room to waddle around in our new smaller house. A reliable count of what I've gotten done is difficult, because I've mixed in other kinds of papers before I started to get it all organized.

A problem with this project is that when I scan one, the necessary "proof check" to see if I got all the pages in the right order nearly always gets sidetracked by the necessity of "refreshing my memory" of the ones that are still really interesting. The folder where I decided to separate the "real books" lists (DIR *.* /s>list.txt) 10,000 lines and is 201 pages, but that includes subdirectories and other data scans, like individual pages where I didn't get the OCR done immediately.

Culling the list brings it down to 23 pages, 1582 paragraphs in the list, with each paragraph theoretically representing one book(?).

I probably was "compelled" to reread at least a fair part of about a third of the books scanned, just because it was fun.

I've eliminated about a dozen "book boxes" of the books (the ones that didn't fit on the shelves) and cleared one layer off of some 11 feet of shelves where they were double-deep; but haven't really started on the music or fiction with the exception of some old hymnals that were falling apart already, and were easy to split down to scannable bits.

Of course that's just my books. "She" won't let me touch her valuable ones. And I've only been scanning in my "spare time" for about a year. And all the re-reading makes me pretty inefficient.

John