Bookshelves, or the Lack of Them

Bookshelves are essential furniture. Everyone who's ever owned books (which is pretty much everyone) knows that the only way to store books in style is with the classic bookshelf. There's an amazing variety of these brilliant bits of furniture - you can buy cheap plastic ones dyed pink (yuk, in my opinion), tall heavy mahogany ones that loom like Goliath over David and imitation wood ones that squat in the corner and serve as accumulators for dust. Yet there are never enough book cases and shelves in my home for the books that I have. Why? Simple: I accumulate books faster than I do the space to store them.

This is a simple and easy to understand concept. One can more easily get hold of books. They are, after all, everywhere: Travel ports, shops of all sorts, libraries etc. Unfortunately bookshelves are more diffiult to locate, generally speaking. It's not every shop that sells teak bookcases that come with book ends and the necessary tools to put them together. Speaking mathematically, we could represent this relationship with, quite simply:

Book Shelves < Books

That is to say, there's less storage schemes than there are books. Which makes perfect sense. Who has more bookshelves than they do books? It makes no sense to have more.

Now, we can expand this by estimating the number of books that fit in the average bookcase. Let's say that  your average bookcase has between three and five shelves on it, each about three feet in length. That means that, assuming each book is one inch in thickness, then 108 books in total could fit on the shelves. This may be expressed as:

108 x Books = Book Shelf

or

108B = S

So now that we've established just how many books can fit on your run o' the mill bookshelf, we can work out how many bookcases one should buy each year.

According to my experience, I gain about 25 books a year, of which I lose about a quarter as I sell older books or give them to charity shops. At the end of a typical year, there are about 19 extra books in my home. Which, if you divide that into the number of books the average bookshelf can hold, gives us 5.7. Therefore every 5.7 years I would need to buy an extra bookcase. Assuming a bookcase costs around £150, that means that I'll be losing an average of £25 every year simply so that I can store all my books. This may lead us one of the following conclusions:

1. I need to stop buying books.
2. I really need to get a life. Heheh. I mean, who works out exactly how much money they're losing due to the number of books that they own? This is crazy.

I leave you to decide which of the two is the more relevant to the current situation. Meanwhile, I'm off to read 'Legend' by Marie Lu (except that's a pseudonym), 'cos I'm a professional book critic now.

Good day to you, good sirs and madams.