Book questions

In the comments to the post below, Mano asked a few questions:

It's possible I missed the boat on this one, so sorry if you've answered my questions somewhere else.  Is that whole room devoted to books, or is there an office space somewhere in that same room?  Do you organize your books alphabetically, by genre, or something else?  How did you accumulate so many books--was part of it a brief stint working in publishing, or just buying lots of used books as a grad student?  Have you read most everything you own?  Do you buy mostly used these days? 

1.  The room with the stacks, which is about 11 x 24, is a books-only zone, as is the smaller of the downstairs bedrooms.  There are also bookcases in the office and the living room (where the art books currently live), as well as in my campus office.  But at least I've evacuated all the books from my upstairs bedroom!

2.  I sort everything by subject (literature, art history, biography, etc.), and then alphabetize.  At one point, I had a dividing line between pre- and post-19th c. literature, but I was too lazy to replicate that in the current set-up.

3.  Rumor has it that the books breed while I'm not looking.  Actually, I purchased a lot of books as a graduate student (and also weeded out a lot--I hadn't yet developed a focused "purchasing plan"); when I left Chicago in the late 90s, I already had a few thousand books.  (And, since I was living in a studio apartment, that meant books in the dining room, books in the closets, books stacked in the middle of the room...) 

4.    I've read a good chunk of what I own.

5.   Although the price divide between used and new almost always comes out to 50-50 at the end of the year, in terms of sheer numbers, the bulk of what I purchase is secondhand.  Most of my off-the-wall Victorian religious fiction comes courtesy of eBay.