India, June 6 -- Somewhere in Kannalu, Karnataka, a man named Anke Gowda has been collecting so many books for so long, he's amassed 1.5 million of them. They're stocked in a large house that functions as a free library. In Indiana in the US, John Q Benham's six-car garage and two-story building are filled with roughly the same number of books. A Guinness World Record marks his as the world's largest personal collection.

In his time, Dr Ambedkar had one of the world's largest personal libraries - his collection had 50,000. Karl Lagerfeld's stash, when he died in 2019, stood at 3 lakh...

OK, we're coming at this wrong. This was supposed to be a guide to decluttering your bookshelf, not glamourising hoarding. But with books, subtraction i...