Thanks to Tinman's, Kalleh's, and Shufitz's wedding presents, Sunflower's and my library of books specifically on language has greatly expanded. That got me to wondering what percentage of strictly language-related books comprise our various member's libraries. I'm guessing about 5% for us - how about the rest of you?

Ooh! Around 1-2% for me at a guess. A couple of dictionaries, a thesaurus, Fowler's, and about three others.

Roughly 50% for linguistics. Next largest subject is film history and theory at about 20%.

Shu is the best one to answer for our home because he is our "librarian." By the way, he gets so annoyed with me that I can't keep our books alphabetized and categorized; he is quite methodical about them.

Our computer room has our language books, about 4 small shelves of them (we double up books on a couple of shelves so it's hard to know for sure). In the rest of our house we have 4 large bookshelves (3 built-in), plus 1 double built-in bookshelf, so I will wildly guess our language books are about 4% of our books are language books.

Shu? Is that correct?

A quite small percentage I think but that's just because there is a VERY large number of books involved. In numerical terms books on language, linguistics and educational theory probably number forty or fifty.

I think I only have about 4 books on language. I didn't even have a dictionary in the house until that first year I started reading this board. Had to ask for one for Christmas!

We have hundreds of books in the house, though - mostly all my husband's. The vast majority of them are books about battles and war and stuff like that. Second in the running for percentage would be cartoons and comic books.

2000 books. Only 4 on language.

Who needs such books, now we have the internet?

For this survey I'm measuring my personal library in linear feet, not number of volumes.

About one third of the 35-foot total bookshelf space has language books. Dictionaries ... German, Spanish, French, Italian, Latin, Chinese, ... and Grammars for Beginners ... Thai, Russian, Cherokee.

Another one third of bookshelf space is occupied by books on the social history of North America since 1500 A.D.

And the rest is a hodge podge of favorite authors -- Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy, and many others. Plus anthologies of essays ....

I subscribe to The New Yorker and Harper's and National Geographic.

And I use the Internet constantly for reference.