I Cataloged All 400 Books in My House. Here's What I Found
Last updated March 28, 2026
For years, I had books everywhere and a rough sense of what I owned. Rough enough, I thought. I knew I had a lot of historical fiction. I knew I had most of Ursula Le Guin. I knew there were cookbooks in the kitchen and a pile of unread novels on the nightstand that had been there long enough to be embarrassing.
What I didn't know — not precisely — was what was actually there. I'd been buying books for fifteen years without keeping any real record. Some of those books I'd read. Some I'd bought meaning to read and never gotten to. A few I had a creeping suspicion I'd bought twice. And at least a handful were somewhere in the house but I couldn't tell you which room.
I kept meaning to catalog everything and kept not doing it. It felt like a big project. An afternoon project, maybe, but still — it required setting aside time, committing to a method, and doing the actual work. I'd start mentally planning it and then just... not.
What finally got me to do it was buying a book I already owned. It was a novel I'd been meaning to read for a while. I was at a bookshop, I saw it, I was pretty sure I had it but not certain enough, so I bought it. Got home and found the copy I already owned on the shelf in the study. That was annoying enough to finally push me to sit down and do the catalog.
The process turned out to be much faster than I'd anticipated. I used Plumerie's barcode scanner — just point your phone at the ISBN barcode on the back of the book and it pulls in the title, author, publisher, cover image, everything. No typing. I moved room by room, shelf by shelf, scanning each book and tagging it to a location as I went. Living room left shelf, living room right shelf, study, bedroom, hallway bookcase, kitchen. (The book barcode scanner comparison is useful if you're picking an app for this.)
I did the whole house in about four hours, including a break for lunch. Four hundred and eleven books, as it turned out. I'd have guessed three hundred. I was off by a third.
My 411-book catalog breakdown
Results from cataloging 411 books across 6 rooms in one afternoon using Plumerie.
The first thing I noticed when I sat down afterward and looked at the catalog was the unread pile. I'd known my to-read list was long — I have a habit of buying books ahead of reading them, which I suspect is not uncommon — but I hadn't known it was that long. Of the 411 books, 187 were unread. Nearly half. I'd spent years buying books and had apparently managed to keep up with only slightly more than half of them.
This wasn't alarming exactly, more clarifying. I'd thought of my unread pile as a manageable backlog. It is not a manageable backlog. It is a significant library of books I have not read, which I have acquired over many years while continuing to also acquire more books. Understanding that changed something, slightly, about how I think about buying books.
The duplicates were less surprising in quantity but more surprising in specifics. I found four duplicate pairs — eight books total where I owned two copies. Two of them I understood: one was an old mass market paperback I'd replaced with a nicer edition and forgotten to get rid of the original. One was a book given to me as a gift that I'd also bought. The other two I genuinely could not explain. I just owned them twice. One of the duplicates was a book I don't even remember buying the first time, let alone the second.
The lending discoveries were the most interesting. I found six books in my catalog that I'm almost certain I'd lent out and never gotten back — I could picture lending them but had no record of where they'd gone or when. There's a particular novel I've been looking for on my shelves for probably two years, occasionally wondering if I'd somehow misplaced it. There it was in my catalog, clearly marked as owned by me, but not in any of the six rooms I'd just inventoried. Someone has it. I have no idea who.
This is the thing about lending books without keeping a record: you don't lose the book in a dramatic way, you just stop knowing where it is. It sits in your catalog as owned, but it's not there when you look for it, and eventually you either assume you lost it or start wondering if someone borrowed it, but you can't remember who, so you do nothing. I've probably lost a dozen books this way over the years. The six I identified in this session are at least ones I now know to ask about.
The Kingkiller Chronicle
Book 1
Book 2The series gaps were genuinely useful to find. I had what I thought was a complete set of a particular fantasy series — I'd collected it over several years — and the catalog showed me I was missing volume four. I'd had volumes one through three, five, and six, for what must have been at least a couple of years. I'd apparently just never noticed the gap because I hadn't gotten around to reading past volume two. It's a small thing, but finding out now, when I could order the missing book, is better than finding out when I finally sit down to read and have to stop mid-series.
I had a similar situation with a nonfiction history series I'd been building. I own books one, two, and four. Not three. I don't know if I sold it, lost it, lent it out, or never bought it. But I know it's missing now, which I didn't before.
“I've already caught myself, twice in the past few weeks, checking my catalog before buying a book at a used shop. Both times I found I already owned the book.”
The most unexpected thing was how much the catalog changed my relationship to the collection immediately — not over time, but right away, the first time I opened it after building it.
Before, browsing my library meant walking to a shelf and looking. I knew roughly where things were, but only roughly. If I wanted something specific, I'd scan the spines until I found it, occasionally spending a few minutes looking for something I knew I owned. After, I could open the app and search. I could filter for unread historical fiction. I could look up whether I owned a specific book before buying it. I could find out which shelf something was on without walking through the house.
It sounds trivial and it sort of is trivial, but the cumulative effect of that shift is real. I've already caught myself, twice in the past few weeks, checking my catalog before buying a book at a used shop. Both times I found I already owned the book. That's two books I didn't buy that I would have bought before, which offsets more than the time it took to build the catalog.
I waited so long to do this mostly because I thought it would be harder and more tedious than it was. Four hours for four hundred books is a reasonable afternoon. If I'd done it three years ago when I first thought about it, I'd have three more years of knowing what I own, fewer mystery duplicates, and probably a friend who could tell me where that missing novel went.
The catalog isn't a project you finish and then it's done. It's something you maintain — you add books when they arrive, update status when you finish reading, log a loan when you hand something to a friend. But the heavy lifting is the initial pass, and the initial pass is just an afternoon. For the step-by-step approach, how to catalog your book collection at home covers the whole process in detail.
If you've been meaning to catalog your collection for a while, Plumerie makes it about as fast as it can be →