to think theres nothing wrong with having a few books?

[slightlymentalmum2one]

Well perhaps few is slightly underestimating 1732 but there's no such thing as having too many right?

I have some books downloaded to kindle app on pc
But I love to coorie down at night with a book

and i did get rid of some a wee while back
and bought twice as many to replace them

i am a book lover. the only books i cull are things i deem to be chick lit or the social worky books which give me nightmares. those two catagories go to my mums WI bric a brac - every other kind of book has a home for life with me
i am stupidly proud of my books and when i was a bit younger i put up wanky glass shelves just to display my cult fiction collection. now i have a huge bookshelf on my upstairs landing which is overflowing with all kinds of books. it makes me stupidly happy every time i look at it. i have removed and boxed up all exp's shite books - there are no empty spaces it just means a few more piles of mine can actually sit on shelves he he.

i have different catagories of book shopping god i am sad. i only treat myself to waterstones if what i want is newly published and i cant find it in the library. even then i prefer the smal branch in the town where i work because its staffed by passionate book geeks. otherwise i make special trips to a really excellent oxfam bookshop (i am probably keeping them open!) where i try to be more open minded about what i read. i prefer 2nd hand books anyway.

i would like a kindle but i dont think im responsible enough (i would drop it in the bath!) plus how on earth do you display what you have read to visitors??

I used to be like that, i was obsessive about books and collecting them. But now I have kindle my life has changed for the better and my house is less cluttered. I have lots of books for book collectors who want to collect

Slag! I've tried explaining it to people, but there is that moment when I'm standing in a university library (because it's gotta be large) when I swear I am almost sexually excited. No other way to describe it really- though it's not quite right.

OP, we're going to have to move house. I'm afraid we have almost exhausted every possible site for bookshelves and no, we can't agree on any more books to chuck out (I'm not prepared to have that argument about why I need more than one translation of Beowulf again).

Get a Kindle. I'm going to second that view. Do you know you can get every 'out of copyright' book for free? So excited (almost sexually) when I realised. Doesn't stop me buying books, but it solves the problem of what to do when you want a handbag but it isn't big enough for your hardbacks.

Another book lover here. DH and I are trying to downsize before our baby arrives in November as we figure we might need a few spare shelves.

Our living room is basically a wall of books plus there's a case in the bedroom for all the crappy can't-sleep stuff.

I do have a kindle, but nothing beats a good book.

Tortu. Marry me.

No such thing as too many books, just too small a house. We seem to have shed bookcases somehow over the years, while continuing to acquire books, so there's a load in boxes in the spare room, and some deteriorating in the loft (weep). Most of the non-fiction is on shelves, so I can find you any number of books about Antarctic exploration, film criticism, cookery, but with my mum having expressed an interest in reading the His Dark Materials trilogy I have THREE fiction books to find and not a snowball's chance in hell.

dd has no book snobbery as yet and loves charity book shopping. she has overflowing bookshelves too plus a healthy library addiction at almost 3.

i was with a mum friend in a library the other day who only let her ds take out one book - she said 'you dont need more than one, we have plenty f books at home' - i nearly choked with confusion. dd doesn't like giving the library books back.

Oh, and I have a Kindle (which comes in the bath wearing fetching attire of a freezer bag and a Klippit) and am doing my bit to keep local libraries going to forgetting to renew my books and accruing large fines. Kindle is funny ... I'm happy once I get going with a book, but there isn't the thrill of opening a new, actual physical book - plus I frequently forget the name of the book I'm reading.

Y are definitely NBU! There is no such thing as too many books. Apart from numerous lovely bookshelves in the living room, our spare bedroom is officially a library. I would never buy a kindle. Part of the wonder of a real book is the smell of the pages, the sound as you turn the page and the feel of it in your hands. Books rule.

The L shaped bit of my hall has 2 bookshelves, then shelves above that,
all filled with books
then there's the above head height to ceiling bookshelves in other bits of the hall
only 4 of them
and a bookshelf next to my bed
and a wee bookshelf in the bathroom...

I would actually prefer to spend a day looking round bookshops & charity shops or cheaper antique shops to a day looking round clothes shops... obviously no-one in RL knows that or they will think i'm just not normal at all.

Harriet I agree, I think it's odd when people have no evidence of books in their house.

As well as book shelves, I have a basket by my bed of books I'm waiting to read. Start to get a bit panicky when it's getting low.

I want to shelve my books by colour now! Currently they are alphabetcial order, within genre subsets.It's logical, but it looks hopeless.

Dd leaves hers all over the place. Drives me nuts! Hers are shelved by 'where I last left them.' Sometimes I go and put all the Rainbow Magics in numerical order. Because I am a loser.

I love passing books on, I leave them all over the place and with various people, I like to think of them being read by lots of people.

I'm bizarrely attached to my kindle, I find it a bit like a security blanket. No more worries about running out of a book to read, it's a whole library small and snug in my pocket. I used to fret about that.

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one. It's a bit scary as my dd's book collection is starting to rival mine. A agree with you DONTCALL about the house being too small.

I'd love to see a colour ordered bookcase! I bet it looks amazing

The only books that we have downstairs are the childrens- two shelves or so.

Upstairs (hidden from view) is jam packed with full bookcases and boxes of geeky books awaiting the time they can go back downstairs and not be piled on the floor and jumped upon by the DDs (youngest is 18mths).

And we both have lovely kindles. In fact sorry MN a lovely dusty old tome awaits upstairs, I'm off.

YANBU, unless you've had to reinforce your floor to stop your shelves crashing down onto the downstairs neighbours. Though I'd be prepared to admit we have a bit of a book problem, the way some people have a bit of a drug problem...

I've got hundreds a few older books as well as lots of nice new ones - I love having a book which was sitting on someone's bookshelf in the 1920s or 1930s whilst there were horses and carriages outside, and a parlourmaid to open the door and say "Modom is not at home": all the while Modom is catching up with her letter-writing and gazing dreamily out of the windowpane at one of those new-fangled motor-car thingies going past, maybe it's the handsome new doctor paying visits...
Gawd, old books are fab. I have sourced and bought some merely on the basis that they were mentioned as the book that everyone was talking about at cocktail parties in a book from the 1930s (t'was The Provincial Lady btw)

(I also have a book from 1769. Imagine what changes that one's seen over the hundreds of years since it was made...)

I keep looking around the house working out where I can fit more bookcases, I have culled my collection as much as I can but they are still doubled up. I would begin floor stacking but I can't let the dogs or kids near them in case of contamination.

How do you feel about broken spines, I have to keep new books pristine and friends will no longer borrow any for fear of causing damage

Whoever it was on here had a photo of it on their profile. Am hoping they see this thread.