Book Math Time

Well, the good folks at Booking Through Thursday decided to make me try and do some math this week. Whomp whomp. Actually I’m quite good at math I just don’t like it, not one bit!

So this week on the blog hop I was asked:

"What’s the largest your personal library has ever been? What’s the greatest number of books you’ve ever owned at one time? (Estimates are fine.)
Is your collection NOW the biggest it’s ever been? Or have you down-sized?
What’s the fewest number of books you’ve ever owned (not counting your pre-reading years)?"

Hmm…this is when I decided to break out my handy dandy calculator! You see, my books are kind of scattered about my apartment. So, let’s work with nice round numbers and try and add it up, going place by place, to get a good guesstimate. First there are my two teeny tiny bookshelves. They really aren’t fit for an avid reader and blogger like myself but I’m poor so they’ll have to do for now. They’re only three rows high and each shelf has about 15 books on it…so that’s 90 books on my shelves. Then there are about 10 or so on my nightstand…so that brings the total so far up to an even 100. I have a nice wicker basket in my living room where I’ve been storing my recent bookstore purchases (they don’t fit anywhere else) and I think that houses a good 15. Plus I know I remember seeing 3 lying on my kitchen counter this morning…so we’re at 118. Are we counting Kindle books? I own about 60 Kindle books (all free, woohoo!)…so that’s 178. Oh and one book is tucked away in my purse right now for me to read at lunch (King Lear).

So that’s a total of 179 books. Not too shabby for someone always proclaiming to be broke and have no space!

As far as the fewest number of books I ever owned? Well that was probably back in college when the only books I bought were for school. But still, I was a history major and you had to buy at least 10 books per course per semester (at the end of each semester I’d sell the books back). Taking a total of 4 classes each term that still put me at around 40 books.

So what’d your book math add up to?