House collapsing under weight of rescued books

[durham_rambler]

No, not us, not this time.
"A Canadian woman's house is collapsing under the weight of the 350,000 books she rescued from a neighbour who was planning to burn them after her bibliophile husband died."
See this story from The Guardian.
"There was a first edition copy of Black Beauty on the top pile and the bottom was all charred off [from being burned] but the top was just immaculate,"

Comments

[helenraven.livejournal.com]

I dreamed about this last night, though my imagination didn't attempt to tackle the real scale of the situation: there was a pile of boxes, and then a room the size of a small church full of unpacked books, where I sorted through a few stacks. Among other things, I found a children's book about the mythological fauna of the Falklands Islands, written in both Spanish and English.

The Guardian article and its commenters seem strangely devoid of curiosity about the man who collected all of these books. I would very much like to know how he did it, and what proportion of them he had read.