Serious book lovers share their strategies for displaying their collections and keeping all those titles from taking over

By Rosa Cartagena, March 3, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST

Here’s a riddle for you: When a book editor and political science professor downsize from a six-bedroom house in the suburbs to a 900-square-foot Manhattan apartment, how many books will they have to get rid of?

For Matthew Budman (the editor) and his wife, Cristina Beltrán (the professor), the answer was a staggering 12,000.

“We had, you know, giant yard sales, and we had people carting off thousands of books,” says Budman, author of “Book Collecting Now: The Value of Print in a Digital Age.”

The transition was tough, but he says it allowed him to recognize that quantity isn’t everything. Now, he keeps roughly 3,000 titles at home (plus thousands more in storage).

Source: How to organize your books — even when you have thousands of them – The Washington Post