{"id":1125,"date":"2026-07-23T18:43:27","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T18:43:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/relocationacrossamerica.com\/?p=1125"},"modified":"2026-07-23T18:43:27","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T18:43:27","slug":"how-owning-books-became-everybodys-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/relocationacrossamerica.com\/?p=1125","title":{"rendered":"How owning books became everybody\u2019s business"},"content":{"rendered":"

If your home contains more than two bookcases, you probably know the cautionary tale of Homer and Langley Collyer. After the deaths of their parents, the aging bluebloods holed up in their stately Harlem rowhouse, once a picture of Gilded Age polish, and became a public curiosity. Homer, who began losing his vision in the early 1930s, almost never left the house; Langley slipped out at times when he was unlikely to be seen, in search of additions to collections that filled the house: books, newspapers, tin cans, clocks, baby carriages, pianos and more.\u00a0<\/p>

Read more Netflix is turning your brain to mush<\/a><\/p>\n

The building, filled to its ceilings, grew increasingly dilapidated; Langley\u2019s paranoia about suspected intruders led him to build mazes of detritus to throw them off. In 1947, after reports of strong odors were reported, a huge crowd on the street watched as police and city officials pried their way inside to look for the brothers\u2019 bodies. They found Homer, but it took weeks to uncover Langley, who had been crushed beneath one of his own towering piles.<\/p>\n

\n

The question of when having a lot of books becomes having too many books is subjective.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Mendel Uminer, a translator, scholar and literary-journal publisher, did not have a Collyer situation when he received a sternly worded letter from his building\u2019s management company. But he did have 10,000 books in a 600-square-foot studio; the letter stated that this was a fire hazard and delivered an ultimatum: Lose the books or risk eviction. In June, The New York Times documented the 31-year-old\u2019s multi-day process of boxing up and moving his library, along with defending its size: 10,000 books \u201cis not as excessive as people might think,\u201d he told a reporter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Most of Uminer\u2019s books were shelved and weren\u2019t impeding entrances and exits. If he had amassed the same number of records, skateboard decks or vintage gaming consoles \u2014 all fire hazards \u2014 would he have gotten the same eviction warning? The question of when having a lot of books becomes having too many books is subjective, but that\u2019s never kept anyone from asking. (Nor has it kept them from saying \u201cThere\u2019s no way you\u2019ve read all of those\u201d like it\u2019s some big gotcha.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Reports of the book\u2019s obsolescence were already exaggerated. Adoption of e-readers like the Kindle and Kobo didn\u2019t replace physical books; and despite the shuttering of mass-market chains like Borders, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, the last 30 years have seen a reading boom. Continued Interest in reading has driven trends and buoyed an industry. It\u2019s also made collection, storage, and shelving a perennial hot topic: Last winter, when a former Philadelphia attorney died, the news of an estate sale for his collection of more than 100,000 books led to lines around the block.<\/p>\n

But actual numbers of books can inspire a kind of intensity (and, sometimes, animosity) that seems absent with other forms of media. During pandemic lockdown, the offices and makeshift Zoom rooms of politicians, pundits and assorted celebrities spawned Twitter accounts like Room Rater and Bookcase Credibility; The New York Times\u2019 celebrity bookshelf detective scanned the bookshelves behind talking heads for notable titles. Long before that, the comments sections of Apartment Therapy and Design Sponge teemed with strong pro and con opinions about libraries arranged by color, vertical vs. horizontal storage, and the brief, almost universally loathed trend of spine-in arrangements.<\/p>\n

A preoccupation with what others have on their shelves might be purely aesthetic, but often conveys something more, like a sense of judgment. When Lex, 36, and her now-wife (a college professor and a high-school librarian, respectively) rented their house, combining their libraries into one felt meaningful. Her in-laws had a different reaction: \u201cWe were showing them the house, and they got more irritated with every room \u2014 like, \u2018You have books in here too?\u2019 It was like they saw it as bragging, like \u2018Ugh, fine, we get it, you\u2019re educated.\u2019\u201d When a 2019 Vanity Fair profile of Beto O\u2019Rourke made note of the would-be candidate\u2019s floor-to-ceiling wall of books, Brian Kilmeade of \u201cFox and Friends\u201d reacted peevishly: \u201cThey point out he has this huge library \u2014 as if it\u2019s a big plus that he reads books.\u201d<\/p>

Read more Republicans want a Smithsonian that skips history\u2019s hard parts<\/a><\/p>\n

Living without books is, for some, equally inexplicable. When Netflix premiered Marie Kondo\u2019s show, \u201cTidying Up,\u201d in 2018, the decluttering doyenne\u2019s personal decision to have no more than 30 books at a time had people reacting as though Kondo had personally backed a paper-shredding truck into their driveways; in both speed and intensity, the responses confirmed that book ownership, from both sides of the issue, is uniquely charged. One friend has suggested a mathematical equation for determining optimal library size, likening it to the half-your-age-plus-7 standard for dating younger people. Your age, the size of your residence and the number of people living there should all factor in, she theorizes, with some extra leeway for those working in or adjacent to the book trade. For others, experiential assessment is enough: Does anyone in your home regularly trip over books? Do you sometimes buy books that you\u2019ve forgotten you already have? Is your partner threatening to leave you?<\/p>\n

\n

A preoccupation with what others have on their shelves might be purely aesthetic, but often conveys something more, like a sense of judgment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

But if it doesn\u2019t affect them, why do Lex\u2019s in-laws care how many books are in their house? What was it about O\u2019Rourke\u2019s bulging bookshelves that got Kilmeade so shirty? Why did book lovers stop just short of challenging Kondo to a duel over something she didn\u2019t actually say? Does a full bookshelf convey intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness, or immodesty and self-importance? And, more to the point, who decides? Mendel Uminer\u2019s plight is rendered with the occasional implied eyeroll \u2014 Did this kid just say \u201cSpinozistic\u201d?<\/em> \u2014 but the crux of it is broadly relatable: The things that give our lives meaning will also complicate them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n
\"Books\"<\/figure>\n

(Getty Images \/ Jefferson Mendoza \/ EyeEm)<\/span> Books shelved spine in<\/p><\/div>\n

And reading is hardly a niche interest, after all, especially at the moment: Sales of books surged between 2020 and 2022, and despite market corrections since (not to mention slippery sales data), sales of physical books continue to outstrip pre-pandemic figures. Publishers deliberately design jackets and covers that will pop on Instagram and #BookTok. The number of independent shops opened in the last decade marks a stunning turnaround from the early Amazon years, when the online bookseller put an estimated 43% of stores out of business. And though reports that fewer Americans read for fun tend to get a hand-wringing kids-these-days<\/em> frame, a 2021 Pew survey found that, in fact, it\u2019s Americans ages 50 and older who \u201care more likely than their younger counterparts to be non-book readers.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The latter finding makes sense to Lex, given that \u201cmost of us just have fewer free hours for leisure.\u201d She\u2019s also noticed that declining emphasis on the Western canon of literature has brought on a new, bookish tribalism. \u201cPeople like to self-sort! They often gravitate toward hyperspecific genres and market subcategories,\u201d she says, though those are often contested as well (see the polarizing \u201cNew Adult\u201d category). \u201cGranularity can be a kind of gatekeeping\u201d that readers actually seek out, she says \u2014 but it\u2019s all, ultimately, reading.<\/p>\n

Books occupy a unique place within physical media \u2014 one of the last forms that does not track, monitor, or encroach on the humans who read them. Their pages don\u2019t flicker with pop-up ads or interrupt one book to tell you about others you might want to read. They\u2019re not surveilling their readers or mining their data. They do not want to know if your experience is satisfactory. And yet they are also as political as they\u2019ve ever been \u2014 not just pages, but tools used every day to inform and protect against dogma and control. So maybe we should be glad that people continue to be nosy\/judgmental\/suspicious about all your books and my books and a stranger on Reddit\u2018s books. It means that books still matter, still challenge, still threaten, still comfort and still bring us joy.<\/p>

Read more The FBI\u2019s refusal to investigate ICE makes it a co-conspirator<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The number of books you have, and the way you shelve them, invites judgment<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1123,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[526,1456,4,1457,1458,1459,775],"class_list":["post-1125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-books","tag-bookstores","tag-commentary","tag-hoarding","tag-independent-bookstores","tag-marie-kondo","tag-reading"],"yoast_head":"\nHow owning books became everybody\u2019s business - Relocation Across America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/relocationacrossamerica.com\/?p=1125\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How owning books became everybody\u2019s business - 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