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Waitrose is one of the major supermarket chains here in the UK. They publish a monthly magazine (and a weekly newsheet). This month's edition of the magazine contains a rather depressing claim from their annual cooking report that the average number of recipe books that people(*) have is no more than eight with only 7% owning more than 20 books. As someone with over 350 books, plus probably another 100 that I have not yet listed here, I find both those results depressing. If Christmas comes (aka me winning the top jackpot of the Euromillions lottery) I would be adding a further 400 titles to my tally; that is the number of recipe books I have "saved for later" on my Amazon account. (*) They don't make clear whether this is individuals or households.

I assume that most EYB Members fall in that 7%, with many of us in the 1st percentile. The Waitrose statistics do not depress me; rather I think of myself as being in elite company! I have about the same number of books as you, and I sometimes wonder if I should pare back to a more "reasonable" number (whatever that is), but when I page through them I always find something I really want to make. My issue is that to make all of the recipes I have bookmarked I need to live to be 150! 

I love EYB and have found my peeps.  I wasn't surprised as no one I know even comes close to my cookbook collection.  Before I retired I was always amazed on the amount of restaurant and take out food my coworkers ate.  One colleague joked that when his wife said "It is time for dinner" the kids would get their coats on and head out to the car.  Another colleague joked she had to dust the stove.  In some high end grocery stores the deli and prepared foods take up practically half of the store.  I think many that do cook rely on online recipes, especially if they are younger.  It does make me wonder why cookbook sales are doing well.  I guess the 1% is supporting the industry.

ABLE good. Less than ABLE bad.

Originally Posted by: JimCampbell

…wife… requesting I cook three recipes out of each cookbook. With 1,382 (1,242 EYB) cookbooks in my collection …

Seems reasonABLE to me. It would take about four years (1382/365) to work through all your existing books picking three recipes from each. All in the spirit of the late Julie Powell and her Julie/Julia Project (the film based on the resultant book Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen is a particular favourite of mine).

Following Powell's example of having to cook more than one recipe a day if you mix-and-match recipes from three different books every day you could do it in less than 18 months. If you planned every meal — breakfast, lunch, dinner — using only your books then you could do in about five months. Throw in a supper and the time goes down lower. But hey I'm a baker and understand baking percentages but with conventional maths I'm dyscalculic.

Way too much math for me!

I'll set it as a long term goal.........

Originally Posted by: DromJohn

Public libraries provide a solid base for cookbook sales.

The public libraries are where I buy the bulk of the cookbooks in the collection. I visit the Friends of the Library book shops usually located inside the library on a regular basis. Great resource, and at $3-$6 a cookbook it's quite a bargain.

Originally Posted by: bittrette

And to think that in the aughts, some internet boosters predicted that there would be no more cookbooks!

I enjoy sitting in my favorite chair and thumbing through a cookbook. It's a daily occurrence.

The one problem I have is I go through Post-It page markers like they're going out of style! It's always fun to go back on a book I read through a few years back and look at the recipes I had marked.

JimCampbell - save on Post-It Notes by adding "I want to cook this" bookmarks instead. Then when searching for a recipe on your Bookshelf, you can apply that bookmark filter and see just the recipes you have already identified as of interest.