The bookshelves in the Library Tower in the house I built (Heljarchen Hall) are eating my books.

That is, all the shelves are full (11/11 possible books on all the shelves). When I select "Activate Bookshelf" instead of saying the proper "You can fit no more books on this shelf" it says "you can put [x] (x is a random number less than 20) more books on this shelf" and deletes most of the books that were previously on that shelf from the menu and from visual display.

I had to empty each individual shelf by removing each individual book, and when I select "Activate Bookshelf" now that they're empty it says "you can place 16 (or 18, or 12, etc) more books on this shelf." That's more than the shelves are even designed to hold.

This is an issue for every single bookshelf in the house.

Is there a fix for this? I've tried saving/reloading, reloading an earlier save, and exiting/re-entering the house and none of that worked.

Perhaps try refurnishing the house if you have a save back that far? The bookshelves in all my library towers have worked fine, I have swapped books around on most of them, re-ordered them and taken books off the shelves without loosing any. It is a glitch you have somehow set off, and if you can find out how you could avoid it. Most faults are likely in the building. How many times did you build the bookshelves after you had already built them?

The other possible source of a glitch would be if you asked the steward to furnish that wing, and then you gave up and furnished it yourself, the steward is still going to furnish it eventually.

I've had this bug with bookshelves in other houses. It's been around since before Dawnguard unfortunately

I furnished that room entirely by myself, and I only built it once. I have a save that's REALLY far back from before I built the house but that was also before I did the No Stone Unturned quest and there's no way I'm doing that again. :/

The shelves worked fine for a long time but just yesterday I noticed the problem. I've since meticulously removed each book off the shelves but unfortunately they're still bugged. If there was a way I could rebuild the library I would, but alas once you build a room it's permanent apparently.

Yep. Don't expect a fix for this any time soon. This has been one of the many problems since Skyrim launched. It's bizarre that they included a full Library wing option with Hearthfire knowing this. Lazy is not the word for it.

Best option would be to just keep your books in a chest and forget about a library entirely. The only option if you don't want your books eaten..

I'll add an update:

I tried placing books back on the shelves anyway, and they seem to work. You can place (for example) 22 books like it wants you to even though the shelf only fits 11, and all 22 books will be in the shelf inventory menu, but only 11 (or less) will be displayed.

I also placed ONLY 11 books on the shelves, and did this to all of them. So far it seems to work, despite the number of allowed books on the shelves being completely wrong. I made a save right before I replaced the books so if something bad happens I can revert to that save.

As I said, placing only the original maximum amount for books on the shelves (in this case, 11) seems to work. I can see all 11 visually and they are all present in the menu list when I activate shelf.

If they get screwed up again/the shelves start deleting them then I will update this post again.

Yeah, the same goes for the mannequins. These are all known problems from early on and makes me wonder if Beth actually takes the time to read all these forums/bug reports. It seems somewhat irresponsible to release DLC if they knew about these bugs beforehand. Patching first should be priority over releasing new content.

I've had the same issue in Honeyside and Heljarchen Hall (and in a previous playthrough in Vlindrel Hall). I noticed it came about if I placed the books and then tried to read/take/move them while they were in the bookshelf. Earlier this week, I was playing around with a full shelf just trying to grab and shift a book over so it wasn't leaning so much, and it jumped from being able to place 0 books to 33 books. When I pulled my books off the shelf, I lost about 2/3 of them.

So, I started a new game with Hearthfire, built Lakeview Manor, and had no issues displaying books on that bookshelf. Around level 30, I bought Honeyside and started to move my extra books (just the books, nothing else) over there. I placed the 18 books on the first shelf, and, rather than popping up one after the other and leaning to the right, there was some lag so that the 1st book fell all the way down on its front before the next book popped up sort of merged with the 1st on down the line. By the time all the books populated, it was a total mess with some books facing cover out, some partially open, and others merged with their neighbors.

I built Heljarchen around level 50, and moved all my hoarded stuff over (~10K lbs). Same issue.

Anyone else having that issue? Or do your books populate and display fine? I'm willing to sell a bunch of my hoarded stuff if people have experienced that it helps.

I eventually got the bug. I usually just dumped the books on all the shelves and read them there, and rearranged them no problems. One lot in the main hall bedroom area for some reason decided to start melding together, removing those books caused all sorts of problems. Nothing I did corrected it so I just put the right amount of books on the shelves and left it.

If you get the problem and do not want to lose your books, just access them one at a time and remove them from the shelf, you will still lose some books if you throw them on the floor for any reason, the glitched books will not appear in the real world. but you can just put them back on the shelf without problems as far as I could see.

There is a possibility the bug is caused by having two books the same on the shelf, usually I never have two books the same on any shelf, but got lazy recently. I certainly never placed those two books next to each other, but the bookshelf seems to move the books, which might be causing the melding problem. The guilty party when I got the glitch was the spell Tome Magelight. the books on either side of them had melded together. I removed one copy of Magelight, nothing glitched, I removed one of the melded books it counted it as removing two books. In the end the number of books the shelf could hold was completely stuffed up.

In the same house two of the shelves in the library wing that could hold 11 books also stuffed up, and they had no doubles at least when I noticed the problem, no books were melded. I had moved some books around, so it is possible the glitch occurred earlier. When I removed all the books one at a time, the shelf blatantly told me it could hold 22 books. In the end I just put the same 11 books back on each shelf, stalked off and left it.

I just built Winstead Manor, built and furnished the library only, so there's nothing else in the house. I removed all my workbenches. Placed one of each of my skill books on the large shelf downstairs, and here's how it looks...

http://s1272.beta.photobucket.com/user/tacoman50/media/Picture001.jpg.html

http://s1272.beta.photobucket.com/user/tacoman50/media/Picture002.jpg.html

So frustrating. I guess I'll reload and make a kitchen instead.

Strange, my books occasionally do strange things after they have been on the shelves for ages, but accessing the shelf will usually line them all up again. Like the weapons falling through or sticking out of the display cases and being ruined, maybe the books are keeping their warped behaviour once something has gone wrong? I was experimenting with a decorating idea with some of my rejects from the shelf gone wrong. Tossed them on the floor for arranging and discovered some just did not want to part, they stuck together.

The game has a barrel that clears all the stolen tags on items, maybe we need one to clear all the wonky behaviour on items the game somehow ruined, restore them back to their original state.

With the weapons you wreck one all of that type behave the same, I never tested it out with the books though to see if the same thing happened. Both my characters have plenty of books so a few rejects never made much difference, the melded ones were kept seperate from all the others once I notice their weird behaviour. I could always go get the same books from another location and put them on a different shelf, and see if they do the same thing. But no none of mine have ever decided to stack themselves up like that on a normal bookshelf. Some of the ones I manually put on shelves look a bit like that sometimes. The three shelves that went wrong looked normal when the books were first put on the shelf, and it was a while before I noticed the weird behaviour with the books melding together.