What do you do with all the books?

GreenWarlock

As a child of Candlekeep, I find I am unable to leave all of those books scattered throughout the game so untidily. They need to be properly catalogued, stored, and made available to those who need to read them. In short, I build a new library by selling them to some store in the appropriate order, so that book sequences are complete and run in order. Typically, I will anoint one of the stores in Beregost to be my new library, although sometimes it is the Friendly Arm Inn, or Thalantyr - whoever will buy my books.

The financial reward for doing so is tiny, the inventory management is painful, but the OCD of a child born into a library must be honored...

How do you deal with the many books scattered through the game?

Tomarctus

The barrel in front of the jovial juggler inn is my library.

BillyYank

For me, it's the nightstand in the rear suite of the Jovial Juggler, or the chest in Joia's (sp?) house at the FAI. Also, I make sure that multivolume works are in order.

Pantalion

For one CHARNAME?

Carried them.

All of them, neatly organised by series across the inventories of the entire party. Ravayu would scour entire towns for new books, and only duplicates were left in place, the rest were kept, permanently, as were literary scrolls, in the Second Library of Candlekeep.

Sometimes they couldn't quite carry all the loot they otherwise could have, sometimes they had to make tough decisions to save volumes of books or a dead party members' gear (the entirety of History of the North was lost due to the flooding of the Cloakwood Mines simply because there was no room in any survivor's pack that wasn't full at the time it happened).

Once they reached BG2, books lost some of their charm since it reminded him of his lost Imoen, but he always held onto any and every unique book to become part of his collection.

Kilivitz

This would all be so much easier if the Scroll Case accepted books like its BG2 counterparts.

BelgarathMTH

@GreenWarlock , You sound like you'd love the Finch NPC mod. She's a gnome librarian cleric of Deneir. Her personal quest is to start a library in Nashkel, and to collect rare books for it that the mod hides around the game. She comes with a "book bag" to collect books in - when I played her in Tutu it was a scroll case that did in fact accept books.

GreenWarlock

Indeed @BelgarathMTH - if I played mods, that sounds exactly like one of the first I should install! Thanks for the tip, I will definitely bear it in mind should I weaken on my no-mods stance

Son_of_Imoen

Finch indeed, I use her bookcase for carrying books around. Though the library I build is private: when I defeat Zhordal at the carnival, I claim his tent as my base of operations and party stash. The left bookcase I use for books, redundant quest items and superfluous spell scrolls, the middle one for armour, robes, helmets and shields that are valuable but I don't use, weapons I don't use plus ammo reserves go into the right bookcase. Six chapters later, I sell it all to buy stocks of potions for the finale.

GreenWarlock

Hmmm, that may well be better than my default stash - I may need to reconsider for future runs

As it is, I make some random adventurer very happy as my default stash is the barrel outside the Jovial Juggler - when arriving from the South, I think it is the quickest stash you can get to. I then overflow missile ammo into the barrel outside Landrin's home, and if I want to collect books into a sane order before selling to my library, they go into the chest that is further West, at the South end of the main street down from Feldpost's Inn and Firebead's place.

The chief benefit is a rapidly accessible stash, near an inn for resting, and the smithy or Feldpost's if I want to sell. Typically though, I will load up on sets of 16 items that I then take to the Carnival for sale, so Zhordal's tent is very well placed - just fiddlier to get to in the first place.

But if you ever wondered why towns had random loot scattered in abandoned barrels and chests - now you now, it is probably my PC to blame

thelovebat

Has anyone compiled the text of all the books into something like a Microsoft word or text document (like Notepad)? In some games like Elder Scrolls games and Baldur's gate there are a number of books and things I encounter but I think I would prefer reading them in a format on my desktop instead of in the game.

BillyYank

thelovebat said:

Has anyone compiled the text of all the books into something like a Microsoft word or text document (like Notepad)? In some games like Elder Scrolls games and Baldur's gate there are a number of books and things I encounter but I think I would prefer reading them in a format on my desktop instead of in the game.

http://baldursgate.wikia.com/wiki/Books

It doesn't have the full text of all of them, but it's got quite a few.

elminster

I put them in Ragefast's home. Poor guy is supposed to have one of the realms best libraries for magical lore but in the game he doesn't have a single book.

JuliusBorisov

elminster said:

I put them in Ragefast's home. Poor guy is supposed to have one of the realms best libraries for magical lore but in the game he doesn't have a single book.

The nymph Abela takes all his time.

Cahir

I'd like to see a mod someday, that could add one-time permanent lore bonus after reading each book for the first time. Nothing fancy, just +1 Lore will be enough. Also it will be cool to add some lorebooks about monsters, reading of which could result with some bonuses while encountering monsters described by it. TraK0 and damage bonuses may be too much, but maybe increased crit chance will not be OP?

Lehigh96

In the Northern section of Baldur's Gate, a female elf named Rinnie asks you to bring her a copy of The History of the Unicorn Run from Razimath so I bring her that book and every other book I can find and create my own personal library on the second floor of her house.