That better not be literally true. Because I've only got a week and half left. And I am making headway. But ... I have a lot of books.

Mike has complained that I did not include a particularly relevant bit of information in my guessing game post. I am unrepentant about that. Particularly as Mike is currently competing against guessers who have even less experiential basis than he does for estimating my library size. He (and they, and any new players) is/are welcome to adjust their guesses in light of new information.

I'll even throw in some additional pieces of relevant information:

(1) I don't double-shelve all of my books. Only about half of my bookshelves are deep enough to accommodate double-shelving.

(2) As it turns out, when you pack small books into smallish boxes, you can fit a lot of them in there. Yesterday, I packed 47 books into a single box. This is not typical. But one might take it as suggesting the folly of assuming that the first four boxes mentioned before are a representative sample. (I did say, didn't I, that that information may or may not be helpful?)

As for the hint as to whether y'all are in the ballpark -- I'm not going to do that, either. But I will say that my hunch is that my mother is probably the person, other than myself, who is in the best position to estimate the number of books I have. So if SHE were to post a guess (hint, hint, Mom), I would be reasonably confident that that number would be somewhere in the right ballpark.