GoKawiilThe number sounds impressive. People hear it and assume a certain grandeur — a private library with rolling ladders, mahogany shelving, one of those brass lamps that appear in photographs of Oxford colleges. The reality is more prosaic. Twenty-eight thousand books, at an average thickness of roughly 2.5 centimetres, is 700 linear metres of shelving. That's the length of seven football pitches, or — in the metric that matters — considerably more shelf space than exists in my house.
This is the first thing you learn when your collection crosses from "large" into "logistical situation": the books will outgrow any space you put them in. Not eventually. Quickly. The relationship between books and shelf space is not linear; it is exponential, because you are always acquiring faster than you are shelving, and the shelving itself takes space that could hold more books. It is a problem with no equilibrium. I have been solving it for twenty years, and I am further from a solution now than when I started.
The Shelving Problem
I have shelves in every room. This is not a design choice. It is a consequence. The living room, the study, the bedroom, the hallway, the spare room, the room that was a spare room until it became a book room, the room that was a book room until it became a second book room. There are shelves in the bathroom. I am not proud of this, but I am also not lying about it.
The shelves themselves are a history of optimism. The first ones were beautiful — solid oak, custom-built, spaced to accommodate the quartos and folios that seemed, at the time, to represent the future shape of the collection. They were expensive, and they filled up in eighteen months. The second wave was IKEA Billy bookcases, deployed with the pragmatism of a military logistics officer: cheap, modular, immediately available, and — this is their great virtue — exactly 28 centimetres deep, which accommodates 95% of octavos and all paperbacks. The third wave was industrial steel shelving in the basement, the kind used in warehouses. It is ugly. It holds a lot of books. At a certain point in a collector's life, capacity trumps aesthetics.
The mathematics of shelving are unforgiving. A standard Billy bookcase holds roughly 80 books per unit (five shelves, sixteen books per shelf, assuming average octavos). Twenty-eight thousand books therefore require approximately 350 Billy units, which would occupy roughly 280 metres of wall space if placed side by side — more wall space than most houses contain. You can double-shelve (books in front of books), which hides half your collection behind the other half and makes finding anything an archaeological expedition. You can stack horizontally on top of vertical rows, which looks terrible and eventually causes the shelf to bow. You can put books in boxes, which solves the space problem by creating a different problem: you now own boxes of books instead of a library.
I have done all of these things. I am not recommending any of them.
The Weight Problem
Books are heavy. This is obvious when you carry them, less obvious when you store them, and dramatically obvious when you try to move them.
A standard octavo weighs roughly 300–500 grams. A folio can weigh two to three kilograms. An art book — one of those magnificent oversized volumes that seemed like a good idea in the bookshop — can weigh five. Twenty-eight thousand books, at an average of 400 grams, weigh approximately 11,200 kilograms. Eleven tonnes. On your floors.
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