This came to my attention:

Strangely enough Snoopy’s theology of ‘Has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?’ didn’t appear to be among the spinal inches on show at Gladstone’s library at St Deiniol’s visited in the line of duty today. It’s a miniature Trinity College, Dublin or Bodleian with a pinch of Hogwarts thrown in.

Gladstone had a vision of creating a reading, thinking and writing space for ’scholars committed to serious and solid work for the benefit of mankind in inexpensive lodgings together with congenial society’. To this end he bequeathed his library of around 32,000 books and wheeled them himself in a barrow from Harwarden Castle to his new library. He read over 20,000 of the titles, and as an anal-retentive type must have kept a list of what he’d read so those who came after him would know how literary minded he’d been. Assuming he didn’t leave his mother’s womb reading Homer or Dante and we start him as a reader at say four years of age, he read around 238 books each year to get to his overall total.

Is this possible? He kept a diary allocating his use of time very carefully and worked 16 hour days, but is it possible to really read 238+ books in a year? Did he have lean years where he only managed 100 or so volumes and had to make up the deficit the following year with a reading list of 300 or 400+? Were some very, very slim like his own 29 page book On Books and the Housing of Them?

There are now around a quarter of a million books at the library – too many even for Gladstone’s speed-reading – still leaving room for a Peanuts, Schulz or Charlie Brown who aren’t in the catalogue yet.