The 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.
I learned about floor loading the hard way, when a crack appeared in the ceiling of the room below my library. The structural engineer who came to assess it looked at the shelves, looked at the ceiling, looked at me, and said something in Flemish that I will translate politely as "this is too many books for this floor." He was correct. The floor joists were rated for a domestic load — furniture, people, normal life. They were not rated for seven tonnes of literature arranged along one wall.
The solution was steel reinforcement beams, installed at a cost that would have bought several hundred more books. The irony was not lost on me. It is also not lost on my wife, who mentions it at intervals she considers appropriate and I consider too frequent.
If you collect seriously, check your floor loading. Consult a structural engineer before you fill a room. Distribute weight across multiple walls rather than concentrating it on one. And if you live in an older building — which, in Belgium, means most buildings — remember that "older" often means "built for people, not for libraries."
The Moving Problem
I have moved house twice with this collection. I will not move again. This is not a preference. It is a vow.
The first move involved approximately 400 boxes. I know this because I counted them, in the way that a prisoner counts the days. Each box held roughly 30 books (you cannot fill a box with books and expect to lift it; half-full is the maximum, which doubles the number of boxes). The removal men — three of them, young, strong, and visibly dismayed — took two full days to move the library alone. The look on the foreman's face when he saw the basement shelving is something I will carry with me for the rest of my life. It was not anger. It was not surprise. It was the expression of a man recalculating the fundamental economics of his profession.
The second move, five years later, involved roughly 550 boxes. The collection had grown. The removal estimate was substantially higher. I hired a firm that specialised in library moves — they exist, in the same way that firms specialising in piano moves exist, for the same reason: the object is heavy, fragile, and owned by someone who will become emotional if it is damaged. The specialist firm packed each shelf in sequence, labelled the boxes by room and shelf position, and unpacked them in reverse order at the new house. It was efficient, professional, and cost approximately the same as a decent used car. Worth every cent.
Lessons from moving 28,000 books: use small boxes (banana boxes from the supermarket are ideal — the right size, strong, free). Pack spine-down, not flat. Never fill a box to the top. Label every box with its shelf of origin. And budget more than you think — more money, more time, more patience, more floor space for temporary stacking.
The Insurance Problem
Insuring 28,000 books requires, first, knowing what they're worth, which requires, first, knowing what they are. This is the cataloging problem in its most expensive form.
I insure my collection through a specialist policy — the kind offered by firms that understand the difference between a book and a piece of furniture. The policy is based on an agreed total value, reviewed annually, with a schedule of individually valued items above a certain threshold (currently anything worth more than €1,000). Below that threshold, the collection is covered as an aggregate: total insured value divided by total number of volumes, producing an average per-book value that is, for a mixed collection, both mathematically correct and practically meaningless. The average value of a book in my collection is approximately €85. This means nothing — it averages a €15,000 incunabulum with three thousand paperbacks, producing a number that describes no actual book.
The individually scheduled items — perhaps 200 books, representing the top end of the collection — are valued by a combination of purchase receipts, auction comparables, and periodic formal appraisal. This list is the single most important document I own that is not a book. It lives in three places: my computer, a cloud backup, and a physical copy in a fireproof box that is not in the same building as the books. Redundancy is the point.
The Relationship Problem
A collection of 28,000 books is not a hobby. It is a cohabitant. It occupies space, demands attention, costs money, and has opinions about interior design. It affects your relationships in ways that are difficult to explain to people who do not collect.
My wife is tolerant. This is not the same as enthusiastic, and I have learned, over the years, to recognise the distinction. The tolerance extends to the shelves in the living room, the shelves in the hallway, and the study that is entirely mine. It does not extend to the kitchen, the children's rooms, or the car (I once stored three boxes of books in the boot for six weeks; this was noticed). The negotiation is ongoing, and like all negotiations, it depends on goodwill, compromise, and the occasional strategic concession — I removed the shelves from the bathroom. She pretends not to notice the boxes in the garage.
Other collectors understand. The look of recognition when you mention the number — the slight widening of the eyes, the nod that says "yes, I know" — is one of the quiet pleasures of the collecting community. Non-collectors, by contrast, tend to respond with one of three reactions: admiration (from people who read but don't collect), bewilderment (from people who don't read), or the particular expression — sympathetic, faintly alarmed — of someone who suspects they are in the presence of a condition.
It is not a condition. It is a commitment. The distinction is subtle but real.
What I've Actually Learned
After twenty years and 28,000 books, the lessons are not what I expected them to be.
You will never read them all. This is obvious, and it doesn't matter. A personal library is not a reading list. It is a reference collection, a research tool, a physical manifestation of your intellectual interests, and a comfort. The books you haven't read are not failures. They are possibilities.
The catalog is more important than the collection. A bold claim, and I stand by it. Without the catalog, the collection is a beautiful chaos — unsearchable, uninsurable, and ultimately unknowable. With the catalog, it is a tool. I resisted cataloging for years, using memory and spatial instinct to navigate the shelves. I was wrong. The day I started entering books into a system — first a spreadsheet, then a database, then the software I eventually built because nothing else did what I needed — was the day the collection became a library.
Buying is easy. Curating is hard. The difficult decisions in collecting are not what to buy but what to keep. At 28,000 volumes, every new acquisition implies a judgment about space, value, and purpose. Is this book better than the one it's replacing? Does it belong in this collection, or is it an impulse? Will I be glad I own it in ten years? These questions get harder as the collection grows, not easier, because the marginal value of each new book decreases as the total increases. The 28,001st book has to justify its existence against 28,000 competitors.
The books outlast everything. They outlast the shelves. They outlast the houses. They outlast the relationships that accommodated them and the bank accounts that funded them. A book I bought twenty years ago in a shop that no longer exists, from a dealer who has since retired, in a city I no longer live in, is still here. It has moved twice. It has been shelved in four different rooms. It has survived everything I've put it through, and it will survive me. This is either a consolation or a burden, depending on the day.
Twenty-eight thousand. It's not a round number, and it's not a final one. The collection is still growing — more slowly than it once did, more deliberately, with a better sense of what belongs and what doesn't. But it's growing. The shelves are full. The floors are reinforced. The insurance is current. The catalog is up to date.
And there's room for one more. There's always room for one more.
📖 Related in the Wiki: Import & Export, Importing Your Spreadsheet
Next in this series: a confession — the quiet, slightly obsessive pleasure of cataloging books on a Sunday afternoon.