The one I fear is a fire. I'm very sorry. That must have been horrible.
My electronic library is much, much, much larger than my physical print library, which is, pretty large and includes some rare books. I would imagine in print it would easily fill my house.
The electronic library is backed up, remotely. Your comment inspired me to do a physical back up to a disk, something I haven't done for a while, apparently last in 2023.
My library is technical largely, heavily focused on chemistry and physics, a decent sized mathematics library, but I have a fairly large history section, some biology, some philosophy and even some religion, although I'm an atheist. I also have a fair number of art books. I haven't read fiction for probably 30 years, but I do have a large set of fiction books from another time. Also my wife reads fiction, quite a bit of it.
At any given time, I probably have 10 books or so out of the library, which I read in excerpts, rarely cover to cover, usually history or on environmental issues. My library has a wonderful Interlibrary Loan system, and I can get very high level technical books not available at Princeton University's library or at Rutgers library. I request these, take them over to Princeton and use their scanners to make searchable electronic copies.
Princeton University also has a repository, Recap, it shares with Columbia, Harvard and the New York Public library and a few other major libraries. You can request these for use in the library and scan them. I got some very old long defunct journals from the 1950's on the material physics of alloys of plutonium, ancient phase diagrams, which included photographs of an actual three dimensional ternary phase diagram. It was amazing how they did things before powerful computers were available.
My son does that for art books, scanning at Princeton, collecting a huge library on Chinese art before he went to China on a grant to study a Chinese artist. He works for Rutgers, but their scanning capability is not that large.
As for marriage, I can't imagine separating from my wife though, although 40 years ago, she agreed to marry me under the condition that if she ever wanted to divorce me, I wouldn't contest it.
She's still thinking it over I guess, and has been for the last 40 years. She's still here and every morning I wake up thinking how wonderful that is, she's still here and hasn't requested a divorce. I think she'll stay. I can't imagine life without her, but we did come close to divorce early in our marriage, two or three years in. I shudder to think of it, what my life would have been. A therapist saved our marriage. The requirement was that I grow up, as the therapist pointed out, reminding me that a wife is not quite like a mother and no one should expect a mother from a wife.
One of us will die someday, I guess, the other soon after so there's that. Happily for me, I'm a decade older than her, so I'll probably get to go first. I don't think I'd live very long without her in any case.
A fire, I think, would be kind of like death in some way though, and I'm sorry you went through that.
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