The Stacks
The canon records the favourites; this page counts the whole shelf. 10,315 books, the lot, audited by a machine and annotated by the man who fed it. The canon explains what the library means; this page is what the library is, down to the holes in it. The numbers recompute nightly and the sentences stay the same, which is the honest division of labour between me and the thing I built.
I. The Build Year
The whole collection entered the shelves in one year, and the machine watched it happen. 2026-10 was the loudest month at 1,964 books; even the quietest, 2026-11, added 74. A library assembled this fast is not inherited. It is built, and the curve below is the construction record.
II. The Tree
One book, one tag, no exceptions: the tree partitions the whole shelf, and the sums check. 5,190 Fic, 4,084 NonFic, 1,041 Gaming. 101 of the 458 leaves hold two books or fewer. The treemap below is the same partition redrawn so the area of every block is the true size of the branch.
III. The Classes
The tree above is how I file the shelf; this is how the Library of Congress would. 4,322 books carry an LCC mark, spread across all twenty-one main classes, and the chart reads the first letter of every call number. P, Language and Literature, leads at 2,165; the smallest class on the chart, V, Naval Science, still holds 2. The marks are the cataloguers’, not my guesses. Another 1,379 carry Dewey decimals as well.
IV. The Ladder
Series are tracked the way a librarian tracks them: by owned depth, not by ambition. 1,029 series live on the shelf; the ten deepest stand below, and the dagger marks the volumes a run skipped on the way up. Completeness is a different question and this page does not pretend to answer it.
- Discworld
- 41 volumes, 1-41, run complete on the shelf
- Boss Fight Books
- 23 volumes, 1-36, gaps at 4, 7, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 21, 29, 30, 32, 33, 35
- Foreigner
- 22 volumes, 1-22, run complete on the shelf
- Vorkosigan Saga
- 22 volumes, 1-20, gaps at 18, 19
- Aubrey-Maturin
- 20 volumes, 1-20, run complete on the shelf
- The Expanse
- 19 volumes, 0-9, run complete on the shelf
- The Wandering Inn
- 19 volumes, 1-19, run complete on the shelf
- Essalieyan
- 18 volumes, 1-18, run complete on the shelf
- The Dresden Files
- 18 volumes, 1-18, run complete on the shelf
- A Book Apart
- 17 volumes, 1-47, gaps at 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 21, 22, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46
V. The Names
Adrian Tchaikovsky leads at 55 books, and the canon already told you why more than a few of the names at the top are the names they are. 5,244 of 7,223 credited authors appear exactly once, which is the long tail doing what long tails do.
- Adrian Tchaikovsky
- 55 books
- Stephen King
- 52 books
- R. A. Salvatore
- 44 books
- Terry Pratchett
- 42 books
- Gene Wolfe
- 39 books
- Glen Cook
- 39 books
- C. J. Cherryh
- 33 books
- Brandon Sanderson
- 30 books
- Lois McMaster Bujold
- 30 books
- Alastair Reynolds
- 29 books
VI. The Translations
652 books arrived in English wearing another language underneath. The language field would call this shelf a monoglot; the translator column knows better, and Andrew Bromfield and Suika carried the most across, tied at 13.
- Andrew Bromfield
- 13 books
- Suika
- 13 books
- Pengie
- 9 books
- Philip Gabriel
- 8 books
- William Weaver
- 8 books
VII. The Centuries
The shelf spans twenty centuries: the oldest book was written in 116 CE, and the 2010s are the fattest decade on it. Publication years follow the first-edition convention, so this is a chart of when the books were written, not when they were printed.
VIII. Errata
Every archive has holes; this one admits its own. Of 10,315 books on the shelf, 10,162 carry no rating: 99 percent, which is the shelf’s way of saying the reading outpaces the judging. Another 1,041 have no ISBN on file. The catalogue answers to the census, not the reverse.
Counted from the catalogue as of 2026-11-06. The numbers are the machine’s; the sentences are mine. The books the canon praises by name, this page weighs in bulk.