when a single transaction's full amount belongs to multiple accoun ts

[Dale Alspach]

You have a problem of tracking expenses. As far as gnucash goes
you spent the money once. You could create a subaccount of books for
recreation or the reverse, i.e., a subaccount of recreation for books,
and put the expense there. Perhaps you use your car for recreation
(driving to chess tournaments) and for other things. Then you might
want a subaccount of car expenses for recreation or a subaccount of
recreation for car expenses.  When you want determine how much you spent
on recreation (with the first setup), you would need to design a report
which would pickup recreation, books:recreation and car:recreation. If
you make subacounts of recreation then you have the recreation total
automatically, but when you want to know how much you spent on books,
you have to pickup books and recreation:books.

This is a question of how much detail you need in tracking expenses.

Several people have posted on this list
setups of subaccounts to track various things. Check the archives.

Dale Alspach