You know your books and pretty much know where they are. People don't decide what they want to read and then look in their file catalog for it. Something catches their eye. They take it off the shelf. That's the way a home library should work.
Books collect plenty fast without anyone having to set out to do it deliberately.
By the time you get to be my age, the problem is more one of weeding out books than acquiring them. Somewhere there ought to be a catalog with a brief description of the life and times of everyone who has ever lived. It would mean more than a stone in a field with a name chiselled on it. No memorial is satisfactory.