On my first day of work, I get to my desk, all happy and gleeful after my Human Resources orientation. My boss has left me an email to get the box out of his office and review what was inside. I ask his assistant which box. She points to a huge case. I lug it over to my desk, open it up with my pocketknife, and find only two documents in there. The first is the first 2500 pages of a specification document. The second is the second 2000 pages of that same specification. Taped to the inside of the lid is a CD jewel case. This CD has a PDF of the documents. The 4500 pages were promptly used as a doorstop for the broken security door next to my cubicle. ''Apparently these documents are standard practice in the construction industry. They are held together by seven inch long bolts, being too large for binders.''

what in Thoth's name needs ''4500 pages of specification?''

It isn't that surprising. I'm working on my certification in construction management, and the biggest thing I've learned is that nothing is ever, EVER as simple or straightforward as you think, especially in construction. Every individual piece that goes into a building, from complex machinery to a single nail holding everything together, is cataloged and described. There's also plans, specific details that need attention, laws and regulations that you need abide by if you want to even start on a project... It just goes on and on. 4500 pages is SMALL for a construction project spec document.

This troper, about eight years ago, was helping her dad print out and arrange a manual for the program [=AutoCad=] 2000. The manual was so huge that it ended up being about 800 pages and fit only into (IIRC) a binder that was about four inches thick.

ThisTroper often wonders if the combined total of all the articles on Tvtropes can be considered a Doorstopper. Then he's realized: It's Tvtropes.

TvTropes could function as the door itself, let alone a Doorstopper.

Once, in response to comments from classmates on the size of a book of poetry this troper brought to school to read in the time left over after finishing state tests, she said, "It's not that big. It's only – oh. 836 pages." Granted, you mostly don't read poetry books or other anthologies straight through, and this troper wouldn't want to (except with standard-novel -size short story collections by a single author). 500 pages is quite a nice size for a novel, though.

This Troper loves Doorstoppers. The thicker the book, the more 'it must be mine'. Of course there are some doorstoppers that I have never finished, including the 'Lord of the Rings' and 'The complete writings of Sigmund Freud' (which I was required to buy and read for a Literature class). At some point I am going to read War and Peace, just not yet.

This troper has a crush for technical/science/reference Doorstoppers. Integral tables? Large catalogs? Dictionaries? He falls in love instantly. He can spend hours just browsing through them.

This Troper read the entire "Unabridged and Uncut" verison of Stephen King's "The Stand" when she was a junior in high school (and LOVED THE CRAP OUT OF IT, by the way). The mere fact that her school's library even ''carried'' such a doorstopper of a book surprised her. Of course, lugging that thing around from class to class didn't surprise her classmates, them having watched the books she was reading (all Stephen King) grow thicker and thicker and thicker throughout her sophomore through senior years...

Pfft! I read it in 5TH GRADE! (I'm in 6th) Now I'm reading ''Under the Dome'' AND ''It''.

*SarcasticClapping* Good for you.

Read both "The Stand" and "Under the Dome" as a sophomore in high school. Took about a week each.

I was made to read James Michener's ''Centennial'' in high school. Great read, but over a thousand pages. I still own my own copy, but whenever I read it I just chuck out entire passages. Seriously, who needs to read a few hundred pages of the geological and biological evolution of northern Colorado? Not me!

This troper once had two Norton Anthologies in her backpack. She never did that again.

DialgaX once placed his two completed ''[=~Darwin's Soldiers~=]'' [=RPs=] on Word. The number of pages stopped at around 700. ''The Insane Cafe 3: The Curse of the Haunted Hotel'' RP peaked at ''over 2000'' pages and was roughly at the halfway point.

This troper enjoyed frightening first year philosophy students by pulling out her copy of The Critique of Pure Reason. "And that's what you'll have to read in third year!" Those who had already had some experience with Kant, aka The Philosopher Who Can't Be Skimmed, actually whimpered.

'''''The Banks Of The Boyne'''''. This Troper was a bibliophile/library-holic/whatever you want to call a reading addict. She managed to finish ''The Pilgrim's Progress'', ''Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire'', and the entire ''ChroniclesOfNarnia'' in two days, and has an average reading speed of 3-4 pages per minute. She spent a '''''week''''' on ''The Banks Of The Boyne'' before deciding that it was no longer worth the effort. (The book is also extremely confusing to read, which was part of the issue, but it was also HUGE.)

This troper loves Doorstoppers because of the way you can read and re-read them and still find things you missed, whether it's neat descriptive passages or making sense of connections you hadn't seen before. Case in point: I'm currently partway through reading ''Lord of the Rings'' for the '''fifteenth''' time and it's still rewarding. So I've saved myself the cost of fourteen new novels.

Also, novels ''have'' to be long to explore characters and relationships and their enormous complexity in the depth they deserve. I read ''Remembrance of Things Past'' in high school and would still say it's the best novel I've ever read.

This troper had a devoutly Protestant housemate who held some fairly strident anti-Catholic views. Among them was that everything the Pope says is considered Biblical canon. This is... not true. If it were, however, and were to contain (at a minimum) all Papal Encyclicals, it would likely require a forklift to read the full Catholic Bible.

Considering the size of some Bibles ''alone'', this Catholic troper thinks a forklift might not be enough if you count the Encyclicals, the Cathechism, ''and'' the Code of Canon Law.

Taking "The World's Largest Dungeon" (an 800 page Dungeons and Dragons adventure) as a challenge, this troper went out and, over the course of several years made his own Dungeon Adventure that is currently 1162 pages in Word Perfect format, and I'm still adding to it.

My (rather funny) ROTC teacher once mocked students' lack of studying by suggesting alternative uses for the textbook (which was average-size for a textbook), one of them literally being using it as a doorstop.

This Troper is a known DoorStopper lover. As a middle schooler, the unabridged The Stand was an easy read, and so was TheMistsOfAvalon. Door Stoppers are pretty much the only books long enough to last more than a few hours.

This Troper recently decided to try reading ''The Subspace Emissary's World's Conquest'' and considering that the school I go to blocks any sites with forums, I decided to save it on my flash drive at home to read it at school during my spare time. I only have 102 chapters copied of it so far, and it had to be split into three files and it took up nearly 9 ''megs of space''. By the looks of it, once the fic is completed, it would take ''50 to 60 megs of space''. Just to put it in perspective, the first 100 chapters took up nearly 900 pages on Microsoft Works Word Processor ''on size 8 font''.

A favourite of this troper. He considers any book shorter than 400 pages to be on the short side. A love for Stephen King and Antony Beevor has led to him reading nothing but DoorStoppers for the past year or so...

This Troper loves to read; DoorStopper books are no large (haha, punny) obstacle. Yesterday evening I bought the Azumanga Daioh omnibus (mentioned in the main article). Finished it this morning, all 700 or so pages! Also, got through Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows the day after I got it. I go through a book quickly if it really catches my interest.

One of the only reasons this troper got a nook is because she didn't want to waist two boxes taking her Harry Potter volumes with her to college in a few years...

How many other tropers can claim to have read IT in a week which you were only reading at night due to being busy and read the first half in the first night? The reason I didn't finish it in two days was because I was reading a lot of H P Lovecraft at the same time: I've got a book of a large portion of his writing which I've only not finished reading after owning it for nearly a year because I keep re-reading the same stories I've already read, which is an honest first for me: I love it so much I can't bring myself to completely read it.

This troper looks at doorstoppers the way most people look at a cake shop window. If I were to name a few, then those would be: my middle school Italian grammar book, of exactly eight hundreds pages. Yes, that book was intended to follow us for three whole years, but a middle school level textbook 800 pages long is a little too much in my opinion; the paper was ultra-thin and the cover was also of thin plastic, practically nonexistent, and the damn thing still weighted at least 2 kg(1 pound = 0.45359237 kilograms). AND, my Italian illustrated two volumes dictionary. I won't bother telling you the number of pages, just that it weights 5 kilograms. Each volume does, that is.