Book hoarders? Oh please.

An article caught my eye the other day: “Ten Famous Book Hoarders.” I mean, how could I resist an article like that?

But something mentioned in the article’s intro was disturbing to a bibliophile like me: By some claims, owning as few as 1,000 books tips you over into the category of hoarder.

Further reading, of course, calmed me down. By the examples of book hoarders listed, I am firmly in the category of amateur when it comes to quantity. (I took a hasty count, by the way; currently we stand at about 1,750 volumes, not counting three hefty totes of children’s books stored in the barn. I should point out this is considerably fewer than the 5,000+ volumes we used to own.)

Of the book hoarders listed in the article, Karl Lagerfeld tops the list at 300,000 books. Yowza. That’s a lot.

Significantly fewer is George Lucas with a comparatively modest 27,000 volumes. Then comes Jay Walker (20,000), Michael Jackson (10,000), Ernest Hemingway (9,000+), William Randolph Hearst (7,000), Thomas Jefferson (6,487), Nigella Lawson (6,000), Harry Houdini (5,000+), and finally Hannah Arendt (4,000). These last few examples strike me as decidedly in amateur territory as far as “hoarding” goes.

Quite how this list was assembled, with the possible exception of Karl Langerfeld, is anyone’s guess, because by no stretch of the imagine are 4,000 volumes a “hoard.” Literal book hoarders – the kind featured on reality TV shows – often have hundreds of thousands of volumes, far more than the collections of the people mentioned.

I have books on book collectors (because of course I do) listing historical figures who assembled considerably more volumes than most people on this list. Some wealthy eccentrics in centuries past filled entire mansions floor to ceiling with books (and this at a time when such volumes were comparatively more expensive and difficult to acquire), then boarded up the building and went on to fill another building, then another, then another. That is true book hoarding.

Therefore I would argue that – with the possible exception of Lagerfeld’s 300,000 volumes – the rest of the people on the list are book collectors, not hoarders.

That’s why I would call myself a collector, not a hoarder. At least, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Source: http://www.rural-revolution.com/2025/05/book-hoarders-oh-please.html