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I'm not sure about other countries. There is a culture refuse to throw away books in Germany. People would put on the streets for free (I found two interesting books with this method).
German book culture is great! When he was in Karlsruhe to profile Peter Sloterdijk, The New Yorker reporter Thomas Meaney seemed surprised by it:
"Over the summer, ordinary Germans who spotted his [Peter Sloterdijk] books in my hands engaged me in conversation on trains, in coffee shops, at universities, and in bookshops." [0]
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/26/a-celebrity-ph...
wild, when I went to germany I only saw kebabs and barber shops
and a rave
> People would put on the streets for free
In the US people put "Little Free Libraries" in their yards. They're all over the place in the Seattle area.
Some dude was giving away books after his talk at the CPP Users Group in Redmond, got some good sci-fi.
That was me!
Every now and then I need to go to the recycling station here in Denmark. They have a special container/dumpster just for books. The second hand shops will take a small quantum of books, stores the buy and resell old DVDs, games, records, porn, comics and what-not, no longer buy books as there's no profit in second hand books. The dumpster is always overflowing with books, books that you're not allowed to take.
Germany is a lot more conservative than Denmark, so I wouldn't be surprised if they where more reluctant to throw out books. On the other hand, other than myself, how many people really want to read random novels from the 1970s or a 140 year old book on economics, telling you that Trump is wrong about tariffs?
Maybe with the advent of LLMs, old books will get a resurgence. If a book is printed in the 20th century, at least I know it's written by humans.
I mean what are they going to do? Burn them? Oh wait...
What is very surprising for me is the height of the books. If you look closer at the picture, seems that most of the books are the same height, so that's very strange for any book collection except if he was collecting the same book editors or... Am missing something ?
I think the answer is in the article text "all meticulously sectioned by publisher". Book sizes differ somewhat between publishers, but each publisher tends to only print books in a few standard sizes. For the paperback editions this is even more reduced, it usually looks to me like all paperbacks from one publisher are the same size.
I never undertood why publishers couldn't agree in 5 different sizes or so.
Because they are an industry, aren’t they? Printing, binding, cover productions, transportation and storage, all that are much easier and much cheaper with a few standardized sizes.
That is exactly what I said.
Space savings... when you get to those numbers it starts to matter and I think he just saw a shortcut because the same format books store more compactly together and usually print the same authors.
I think he sorted them by height. If you look closer you can see also shelfs with different sized books that were too non standard.
That was the first thing I noticed - a lot of those book covers look shockingly uniform. Maybe there’s more standardization in localized German publishers?
The article noted that at least some of the sections had been organized by publisher, so that could increase the uniformity within those sections.
Similarly, sorting and measuring all the books by height and weight may have been a part of the project of planning the shelves in the first place. It does look like an attempt at efficient packing, which I suppose you would need to keep that many books in that house and relates to the structural engineer's surprise that the the weight was well distributed as well. (Professional libraries have made mistakes in planning the weight of shelves because books are heavier than you think they are, especially when shelved. That was an interesting finding.)
All of that implied work is more shame that the likeliest outcome after the owner's passing is that the books will be separated from the shelves and the house. It almost feels like the whole thing should have been preserved as a museum. I suppose it helps that there will at least be photos and notes about it like this article.
Yah, I noticed that, too.
The infamous Bookshelf of Procrustes where every book fits - too tall books have their tops lopped off and too short books are stretched out.
The slanted library lining the attic of his home is to die for. I could easily see this happening to myself in my old age. I love books and it's quite a challenge to keep and collect all of them. Why haven't I thought of slanted ceiling book cases before? And 70k books by the time you are 88, that's only 1000 books per year after age 18. Okay that does work out to more than 3 books a day, so reading every single one is challenging, but in your old age an unread book is something to look forward to. I'm sad to read that he's passed away.
I’m not familiar with the “modern car” unit of weight.
“With an assumed average weight of 300 to 400 grams per book, the weight of around 15 modern cars is currently stored in Schröder’s detached house.”
350 grams x 70,000 books = 24,500 kg. About 54,000 lbs.
Can a ‘typical’ house bear that weight??
Depends on the size of the house and both the flooring and the foundation. Just before that the article mentions that a structural engineer was consulted and said it was fine, and you get a lot of mileage out of having most of the weight connected to the frame.
4.90 x the mass of an African bull elephant 2.04 x the mass of a London double decker bus 0.122 x the mass of a blue whale
Why the article didn’t express it in units of blue whale is beyond me.
> Can a ‘typical’ house bear that weight??
Modern builds codes require living areas to support 30-40 pounds per square foot live load so while you wouldn't want to pack it all in a 1k sq ft second floor apartment, it's doable in a larger space.
If it's an old house that was overbuilt before building codes were optimized, chances are it can support it. It also matters a lot whether this is an upper story, or just a single floor detached house sitting on a concrete foundation.
I went to a local estate sale of a professor, whose entire downstairs (4+ rooms) was filled with bookshelves full of books. They were well organized by topic, and covered a range of topics (math, science, health, fiction, biographies, etc). It was more functional than artistic, comparing it to the pics in this post, but the number of books was probably the same order of magnitude as our local public library’s collection, or a small bookstore.
I went at the end of the 2 or 3 day sale, and it still looked full. They were charging fair prices for the used books, but were going to pay to haul the remainder to the dump. I’m still unhappy about the waste, even though I mostly understand it.
The thrift stores take them. No need for the dump.
My experience was different. Even the local library was dumping a lot of donated books, which was surprising since they did have book sales.
Frankly, most titles are junk, like most TV shows are junk.
Disheartening to say the least. A cache like that would sure to a have single volume that would more than pay for the price to pay to have them moved and stored for a year… the idea that there are countless volumes of that caliber most likely in a collection like that means whomever is responsible is literally throwing money away… based on what you’ve described I could easily see a collection like that fetching at least a hundred thousand dollars, maybe substantially more.
This reminds me of Peter Sloterdijk describing books as "bewusstseinserweiternde Drogen" (mind-expanding drugs) and "Waffen" (weapons) in his working library. [0]
[0] https://youtu.be/Wn5EgkuQb5U?t=293 (4:53)
I wish they had talked a bit more about how he managed to re-read any of the books, because from the pictures a great deal of them seemed like they were rather inaccessible.
A friend of mine has mad Jenga style stacks of manga all over his flat and I will be forwarding this word to him.
He probably didn't even read all of them once. Books are like wine: you don't have to drink all the wine you have before buying more.
Awesome. I bet the acoustics of the house are very interesting.
My dad left me several thousand books. Mostly about airplanes and warfare.
If you have a library that you want to keep out of the landfill, your job is not storing them, but convincing another human being (who's younger than you) that the books are of value. If no one you know has ever borrowed or expressed interest in them, then the shelf you relegate them to is as good as the landfill.
I keep the ones I want and sell the rest to used bookstores or give them to the thrift stores.
I tried selling some on Amazon. That doesn't work at all.
As a buyer, I find buying used books on eBay much better than buying used books on Amazon.
I find the prices + shipping about the same.
Where ebay gets ahead is buying a box of books, rather than individual books.
...do you still have any?
only ones I want to keep
7k for 70,000 books sounds insane.
Comment was deleted :(
But you nobody can read 70k books, so what was the point? He had a library nobody knew about, full of books he hadn't read.
That's not a library, it's an imitation of a library built by someone who doesn't understand what a library is for.
Not every book in a library is meant to be read like a novel. Some books need only be referenced, briefly and periodically.
The article doesn't say much about what was in the library, but it does mention that it contained 10,000 thriller novels.
That's roughly on par with saying nobody needs the internet or a library at all.
Back the 1920s having a personal library was fairly common for people with more than two dimes, they had this thing called an 'Ex Libris' which roughly translates as 'from the books of'. This was a little piece of paper, often very nicely designed that you glued to the first page of a book and then you could borrow it freely and sooner or later it would find its way back to you.
This was the rough equivalent of wikipedia, only a lot slower and less convenient. Then encyclopedias (which existed for a long time) became larger and larger, I had one from the 18th century that got lost in a move but it was a work of art, so much effort had gone into making that. The encyclopedias of the newer ages were however far larger and covered more subjects. Ever year a new batch of pages or the occasional reprint was the norm. And then personal libraries went the way of the dodo. Every time one of my family members dies there is always the same question: what will happen to all the books. These people - and me too - spent a fortune on their books, untold tens of thousands over a lifetime. They were well read, not 'browsing' information but actually reading - and occasionally writing.
That library in the article is exceptional in one way: that it does not look like it was shared. But I can totally sympathize: some people are focused on the number of digits on their bank account, others derive their sense of wealth and accomplishment from their bookshelves. I don't own any books I have not read, but I do understand people buying books that they intend to read at some point but never get around to.
As these things go, I'd be happy have a million more book hoarders, even if they don't read them all, so they can be passed on to the next generation of booklovers, assuming they can still be found.
Hoarding/archiving/collecting is quite fun. I don't think it's a stretch to say he likely read more then the average person, and from his own collection too!
[I had to do the calculation: 70K/365 ~= 192 years, i.e. 2.5 or 3 books per day assuming a standard lifetime. Yep, it's a lot of books.]
There’s an interesting term from the book the Black Swan, an antilibrary, which gains value from books that haven’t been read, but are at hand. Essentially resources for new ideas.
Crafted by Rajat
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