Plus or minus one ear....

Have you ever heard of a Smoot?  I hadn't....until Librarything wrote to me this morning and told me that they had added some new measurements to our collections, bless them. 

I am happy to report that, of the ones I have catalogued (which I calculate to be about half of our collection), we have 45,215 Smoots worth of books - that's if you laid all the pages in all the books end to end.  "What's a Smoot?", you may well ask. As I did.  Smoot, according to Wikipaedia, is a non-standard unit of measurement.  Back in the day, before I was born, Oliver R Smoot Jr obligingly lay down on the Harvard bridge and let his fraternity from MIT measure the bridge in Smoots.  It's about 1.7 metres or 5ft and 7 inches - plus or minus one ear.  If you don't like that measurement, Librarything have obligingly provided other comparisons - blue whales, elephants and bathtubs.  I am happy to say that we are 0.02% of the way to the moon with our books. 

Our book stack is somewhere between the Taj Mahal and Big Ben. We would need 69 U Haul boxes to pack them up or 16 Ikea Billy bookcases to unpack them. 

I do like counting and indexing.  Do you?  It has become a tad obsessive lately and the family is becoming worried.  I catalogued the pantry this week in an effort to demonstrate to hubby that we needed no more noodles.  So far, it hasn't worked.

PS My book review of James Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late: A Novel made it to the front page of Librarything - hooray! I also posted it on the Complete Booker blog which is a great blog site for reading up about Booker Nominees and Winners.