Today's Fun Facts

Catching up with The New Yorker, here's a quote from "Future Reading" by Anthony Grafton, Nov. 5, 2007 p. 53:

A conservative reckoning of the number of books ever published is thirty-two million; Google believes that there could be as many as a hundred million. It is estimated that between three and ten per cent of all known books are currently in print, and twenty per cent - those produced between the beginning of print, in the fifteenth century, and 1923 - are out of copyright. The rest, perhaps seventy-five per cent of all books ever printed, are "orphans," possibly still covered by copyright protections but out of print and pretty much out of mind. Google, controversially, is scanning those books although it is not yet making them fully available; Microsoft, more cautiously, is scanning only what it knows it can legitimately disseminate.

No surprise here, I guess

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people's grammatical mistakes make you insane.
Dedicated Reader
Book Snob
Literate Good Citizen
Non-Reader
Fad Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

Yeah, I've read a lot - - though, given my famously Low tastes, I hope it's not accurate to characterize me as a "book snob". And, again, given my own imperfect mastery of spelling, I'm not especially offended by others' grammatical mistakes. But, yeah, I guess I'd have to say that "obsessive-compulsive bookworm" is probably a fair cop.

(A shout-out to LJer "ecbatan" for the link.)

Jefferson's Library

About a decade ago, we realized that our books were more numerous than the library that Jefferson sold to replace the LC. Think of that: our late-90s collection - assembled by an ordinary couple in an ordinary suburban house - was numerically as big as the LC used to be, early in the 19th century. That's some sort of index of how rich our society is today.

Over on LibraryThing, they're loading in the catalog of TJ's library, the collection he sold to Congress to rebuild the LC after the British burned it.

"On Jan. 30, 1815, Congress approved the purchase of Thomas Jefferson's personal library of 6,487 books for $23,950."

So that's an average price of $3.69 in 1815.

(As it happens, that was a high point for American prices - prices had jumped by fully a third due to the War of 1812, and, except for the Civil War, prices would generally decline for the rest of the 19th century.)

according to

http://measuringworth.com/calculators/ppowerus/result.php

$23,950 in 1815 was worth $323,830.99 in 2006: $49.89 per book
(A further 3% inflation gives us $333,546 in 2007: $51.42 per book.)
So, say, roughly $50 per book, mostly leather-bound hardcovers.

So, Jefferson's collection was sold for more like "Folio Society" prices than like "bookstore" prices.

(Sidebar: Note that relentless inflation is mostly a post-WWII phenomenon - American prices were essentially the same in 1941 as they were in 1815:

According to this calculator:
$13,075.32 in the year 1900 has the same "purchase power" as $23,950 in the year 1815.
$15,645.41 in the year 1915 has the same "purchase power" as $23,950 in the year 1815.
$24,190.95 in the year 1918 has the same "purchase power" as $23,950 in the year 1815.
$23,660.87 in the year 1941 has the same "purchase power" as $23,950 in the year 1815.)

"There's more to life than books, you know..."

I was participant in a conversation over on LibraryThing that touched on the question of, well, how many books is enough? How many books do you think you're ever going to get around to reading?

The conversation moved on before I could recall enough of the following anecdote to cite it (or even find it: but, yay Google) - but at the time I was vaguely reminded of a factoid that I eventually tracked down to Diana Trilling's obit in the New York Times, October 25, 1996 (this is snipped and re-arranged - and I should learn how to do 'block-quote'):

"I graduated from Radcliffe without having read a line of Homer or Dante or Chaucer, without knowing anything of Shakespeare," she said.

Diana Trilling's career as a critic began in 1941, at the age of 36, when she overheard a telephone conversation between her husband and Margaret Marshall, the literary editor of The Nation, who had called to ask if he could recommend someone to write the magazine's literary notes column. When her husband hung up, Mrs. Trilling looked at him and offered herself for the position.

She began writing in 1941 and never stopped.

At one point, as a critic for The Nation, Mrs. Trilling read a novel a day for six and a half years, delivering challenging reviews on some of the most important works of the modern era: Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited," Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," Jean-Paul Sartre's "Age of Reason" and George Orwell's "1984." {end NYT quote}



Assuming that's literally true: six and a half years @ one per day = 2374 books. (two leap years makes it an even number....)

Now note that Trilling lived to be 95, so ten times that number of books is certainly possible.

How many people here have had periods when they've read a book a day?