[geniium]

What is very surprising for me is the height of the books. If you look closer at the picture, seems that most of the books are the same height, so that's very strange for any book collection except if he was collecting the same book editors or... Am missing something ?

[blywi]

I think the answer is in the article text "all meticulously sectioned by publisher". Book sizes differ somewhat between publishers, but each publisher tends to only print books in a few standard sizes. For the paperback editions this is even more reduced, it usually looks to me like all paperbacks from one publisher are the same size.

[kwanbix]

I never undertood why publishers couldn't agree in 5 different sizes or so.

[sinuhe69]

Because they are an industry, aren’t they? Printing, binding, cover productions, transportation and storage, all that are much easier and much cheaper with a few standardized sizes.

[kwanbix]

That is exactly what I said.

[pseudohadamard]

They're German publishers, they probably all adhere strictly to DIN sizing.

[jacquesm]

Space savings... when you get to those numbers it starts to matter and I think he just saw a shortcut because the same format books store more compactly together and usually print the same authors.

[IncreasePosts]

The infamous Bookshelf of Procrustes where every book fits - too tall books have their tops lopped off and too short books are stretched out.

[vunderba]

That was the first thing I noticed - a lot of those book covers look shockingly uniform. Maybe there’s more standardization in localized German publishers?

[WorldMaker]

The article noted that at least some of the sections had been organized by publisher, so that could increase the uniformity within those sections.

Similarly, sorting and measuring all the books by height and weight may have been a part of the project of planning the shelves in the first place. It does look like an attempt at efficient packing, which I suppose you would need to keep that many books in that house and relates to the structural engineer's surprise that the the weight was well distributed as well. (Professional libraries have made mistakes in planning the weight of shelves because books are heavier than you think they are, especially when shelved. That was an interesting finding.)

All of that implied work is more shame that the likeliest outcome after the owner's passing is that the books will be separated from the shelves and the house. It almost feels like the whole thing should have been preserved as a museum. I suppose it helps that there will at least be photos and notes about it like this article.

[pseudohadamard]

Particularly if you get series like the 6.022e23 identically-bound Lesezirkel books or the dtv or rororo ones in standard Taschenbuch format, you'd get a wall of identical volumes.

[lukan]

I think he sorted them by height. If you look closer you can see also shelfs with different sized books that were too non standard.

[WalterBright]

Yah, I noticed that, too.