Collector or hoarder?

Today was the day put aside for the big sort of all the fiction that I have accumulated over the years. I threw all the books onto the floor, as you can see here and then put them all back in alphabetical order. A long job, but a delightful one – I found books I had been looking for and books I had long forgotten about, some books not read, some read many times, some very old, some very new.

I have always bought books, right from being a teenager and roaming the second-hand book shops in Bradford. I can remember ‘helping’ at jumble sales at the local church and arriving home with piles of books, bought for next to nothing. So I have accumulated a huge collection, an eclectic mix spanning decades, and find it so difficult to part with any.

Now they are all dusted and sorted and all the ones that had got strewn over the house have been collected up and put in their correct places. It looks good.

Now to start on the non-fiction . . . oh maybe that will have to wait a while. I need to bask in the joy of having my 25 Iris Murdoch novels all together and they are between Alice Munro and V.S. Naipaul!!

So the question is: am I a Collector or a Hoarder or perhaps an Accumulator?

And – how many of the books here are on your shelves?