What’s the most books you’ve had in your own room? My current number is 140. What was the chosen book or series you love? by Kyle Phoenix

 

Heh heh.

In my room/apartment/house/storage room?

A standard 5–6 shelf bookcase holds about 250–300 books in my experience. Maximum upright and well displayed, 6 bookcases. About 1500 books.

BUT

I also have a storage room, where I have banker boxes—-which hold about 20–40 books——and they are 10 deep by 10 high, about 100 along one wall plus another say 40 in the center, all full. So that’s about 4000+ books.

And then another say, 500 magazines and then about 8 long comic book boxes, 300 comics to a box, about 2400.

Also there are about 20 banker boxes of my own published work—Drafts, proof copies, notes, etc.. Probably about 100 books I’ve written.

So I own about 5000+ books because I read on average 250 books a year, 5 a week. Trying to pace my departed grandmother, who did the same.

I don’t watch TV or too many movies, though I do have Netflix and Amazon Prime—-so I might watch something from there, a couple of hours a week or longer from documentaries about space, history, psychology, society, etc..

Right now I’m reading How To Understand Everything—-about consilience, a biography on Mao, Dot Com Secrets (plus Traffic and Expert in the trilogy of marketing books), The Man from Taured. Next up is Lanza’s trilogy on Biocentrism and some more biographies plus a few anthologies.

About 200–300 of my storage of books are sci/fi fantasy books—-I read through a lot of them in my teens and 20s in college as sort of a mental breather from the deeper stuff I was pushing through. Star Trek, Deep Space Nine, Keith Hamilton’s work, I tried some superhero novelizations, X-Men, John Constantine, Justice League—-mainly to see the writing style of superhero action. I’ve read and enjoyed a few Stephen King books—-The Stand, Cell, Insomnia.

I’ve read/have probably a good 1000 books on African American culture, art, fiction, non-fiction, biographies—I was a TA for a Black Literature class.

Another huge section of my personal library is about Education and teaching—-about 500 books.

Then another cross section about psychology-the mind, learning, sociology——I enjoy learning about people and how they see/frame reality. There’s a huge amount of textbooks and books on business, motivation, thinking.

Then I have another 2000+ books in my Amazon cart/Wish List that I shop from regularly. I try to only buy from them or at least comparison shop before I buy elsewhere and delay gratification for a better price. High average: I’ve spent around $3000 a year on books, average $10 a book—-not bad. School—-teaching and classes I’m taking can vary that up to $5000 a year. But I can proudly say in 20 years of higher education , I’ve only ever sold back 1 book—-an algebra book—-I like to keep my books, looking at them, touching them, smelling them.

I’m not much of an eBook reader though I published about 90% of my own books in paperback and eBook. I just physically like books. I do read a lot of articles online but there have been a few magazines that I actively collect over the years—-O: The Oprah Magazine, yes, I have them all; about 10–15 solid years of Black Enterprise magazine and Vanity Fair.

I have book/subject aims—-rounding out my business and technical section with more biographies of people—-that’s probably another 500+ books. Writing and teaching tend to be of the same energy as reading another’s work so when I’m in Finals or working on a project I generally have to put works aside, heavy works especially.

An apartment I had in Flushing, NY had a massive living room—-maybe 24x20—-so I was able to put up 6–8 bookcases on just one side of it. It also had a massive enclosed dining room that i could have converted to a library/office. But I also had a large bedroom with king sized bed—-I try not to house more than a few books on my nightstand—-no TV, electronics, etc. in the bedroom—-it’s only for rest and recreation and sleeping/light reading. But just by overflow I had a couple of bookcases in there—-I used to have these collapsible bookcases—-about 500 held to the set of them that I had in the bedroom. Now it’s a bit less though I am currently bookcase hun ting which is why this question caught my eye—-I’m probably down to about 200 in my bedroom now.

My big time, I love you books goal is to order 10–12 real wood bookcases from a furniture shop here in NYC—-about $250 a piece along with a grand king sized bed ($2500 too) for my next large place/house. Apartments in NYC are difficult to get just for books so it would have to be a house to forsake my storage room (which I’ve had for years).

Yes, I know this is somewhere between collector and addict but it’s not as bad as it could be. I had a bookstore some years back, liquidated a large portion of them (I used to buy massive book lots through eBay) but I still had about 1000 leftovers that I eventually donated to a school My collection could be much larger. lol

So I average buy about 1 bookcase worth of books a year (250) and probably when I move out of the country liquidate at least half in 20 years—-you know, down to a reasonable 5000 or so. :)

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