The OF Blog: Updated non-English library totals

Sunday, May 06, 2012

Updated non-English library totals

Last fall, I did a calculation of the number of books, religious and non-religious alike, that I owned in various languages.  Thought now would be a good time to update those totals, as my non-English library continues to expand as a percentage of total books owned (if I'm really bored, I'll spend all day sometime unboxing six boxes' worth of books and count those, a few hundred unboxed/unshelved books, and over a thousand shelved books in English to know the precise number of English-language works I own).  Anyway, here are the updated totals, not separated into religious/secular or print/ebook formats:

Spanish – 476
French – 175
German – 109
Italian – 47
Portuguese – 45
Serbian/Croatian – 34
Latin – 14
Greek (ancient and modern) – 10
Russian – 7
Persian – 5
Catalan – 3
Romanian – 3
Arabic – 2
Irish – 1
Hungarian – 1
Gullah – 1
Norwegian – 1
Haitian – 1
Czech – 1
Indonesian – 1
Polish – 1
Turkish – 1

That's 939 books in 22 different languages.  No, I don't read 22 languages fluently or even well enough to decipher what is being said in those languages even when using a dictionary (most of the latter are just a hobby of collected used Bibles translated into 16 different languages), but I can say that I've read about half of the titles that consist the totals listed above.  Most of these are considered to be "classics" of prose, drama, and poetry, but with some so-called "genre" works mixed in, especially when it comes to Serbian, Portuguese, Romanian, and some Spanish.  I hope to pass the 1000 mark later this year, but that will depend in large part on what I discover used at McKay's or word of mouth.  I'll update the figures sometime later this year, maybe toward Christmas time.

No comments:

 
Add to Technorati Favorites