The Hard Choices of a Committed Bibliophile
I love books. Absolutely love them - maybe too much. I buy them whenever I can, sometimes in favor of other needed requisites, like food, gasoline or even - eek! - coffee.
But that’s okay. I feel like I can share that here. I imagine that many of you probably have the same habit that I do…that ink and paper monkey riding your back…just another hot fix of cool prose…just one more…
One of the biggest issues that booknuts like myself face is - well - what to do with all of those books once you’ve read them? I’m torn, myself. I tend to become extremely attached to my books, particularly those that have enlightened or entertained me to a greater degree. I find it extremely hard to part with them. Still, in order to get more books (without my wife kicking me out of the house) I have to do something with them.
Sometimes I box them up and store them in our attic, sometimes I give them away to friends or take them to the library for their collection. Sometimes I don’t do any of that. Sometimes they just stick around.
I was wondering today what you do with all of your books? Do you keep all of them? Do you give them away or sell them once you read them? Somewhere in between? What is your preferred method of thinning down your book flock? What criteria - if any - do you use to make these hard decisions….or is this a hard decision at all for you? Do you have any special exceptions? Books that you feel especially attached to?
Let me know.
UPDATE: I’ve uploaded some larger photos from one of my book cases for those of you who enjoy looking through other people’s collections. I know I do. See one of my book cases here.
April 10, 2008 at 8:30 am
When did you sneak into my office to take those pictures?
Culling the herd of books in my house is a very painful process. There’s two distinct, but overlapping collections. Mine and my wife’s. There’s a lot of sentimentality that each of us might have for a book, so in order to get rid of books, I have to go through, make a pile of the books that I can part with, and run that past my wife for approval from her.
I think the hardest books for me to part with would be the favorites I grew up with.
When its time to go, the books get boxed up and given to my father. He’s retired and reads about a book or more a day, so he appreciates getting to read pretty much anything that crosses his path. Then when he’s done, if any of my nephews don’t want them, they get traded in by my dad at the used book store for other stuff he wants to read.
April 10, 2008 at 8:32 am
It’s a real struggle for me. Working in several area libraries, I find (literally) tons of books, either discards or donations that we sell on-the-cheap, stuff like Michael Marshall Smith’s (signed) More Tomorrow and Other Stories for 50 cents that you can’t get online for less than 50 bucks. When they’re that cheap, I tend to buy stuff that I hope to someday read, but they often pile up unread.
It’s a little morbid, but about once a year I go through as many of my books as possible and give them the “first page” test. Then I think, “If I knew I only had five (pick your own number) years left on this earth, is this a book I’d read?”
It helps. Not much, but it helps.
I usually take my discards to thrift stores. In Baltimore, we have a wonderful place that will take anything called The Book Thing. The problem is you tend to leave with more books than you donated, since all the books there are free.
April 10, 2008 at 8:33 am
We’ve got 4 stories full of books, luv em luv em luv em, but if we want more we have to make room. So at our annual Xmas party we give away a couple of hundred or more. The criteria I use is that dated nonfiction goes first, followed by accidental duplicates I’ve acquired & magazines I don’t need to save, then mediocre thrillers I don’t need to read, books on tape/CD I won’t be listening to again, then I start thinning out the competent stuff that doesn’t move me emotionally. Ideally, at the end of my life, I should only have books which are “essential”–books that move me tears, or that I know I can still learn from, or that I want my kids/grandkids to read (whether they think they want to or not).
April 10, 2008 at 8:38 am
They go into a carton(s) in the mud room unless I can give them to friends or family; I used to have a nun friend who was a librarian who came once a year and took the cartons away. Now they go to the local library. Annie Dillard used to leave hers on the front walk for students to take away, the problem being that passers by often saw ARCs or presentation copies that they’d handed off to her with fond regards.
I keep books/authors I LOVE and as the shelves look a lot like yours, the rest have to go.
April 10, 2008 at 8:54 am
So far, 2/3 of my floor space is now occupied by books (in which case I keep my books and don’t give them away). I tend to loan my books out so they might end up in the state of “accidentally not being returned” which is so far the only method that my books have thinned out. On a positive note, my brother did move out of the house so more floor space for me! In a few years or so though, I’ll have to go through the book culling process…
April 10, 2008 at 8:57 am
First, that’s a beautiful sight. There’s nothing I like better when seeing someone’s place for the first time than to see what they have on their shelves and to know their criteria for holding on vs. letting go.
I do a light weeding every couple months, and a hard weeding every year. Light weeding means a quick browse of the shelves to see if anything pops out as being especially useless or no longer important. Hard weeding means questioning every volume, at least for a moment. On the me-oriented side of things, I ask–am I likely to re-read this, is this book actually important to me, if I get rid of it, will I easily be able to access it in the future? On the other-oriented side of things, I ask–does the local library have anything at all by [obscure fantasy author], would any of my friends like to read it, etc.
Moving books is a pain, and I’ve moved three times in the last five years. Last time around, I resolved to lug no more books around the country that weren’t actually important to me, or regularly useful, or very likely to be re-read.
All that said… some things I can’t let go. I’ve never yet sold/donated/given away a Lovecraft. None of the literary/stylish fantasy goes away either–too hard to replace, because you’re not just going to trip over them in 90% of used bookstores. But by that yardstick I should be able to let go of The Sun Also Rises, because it’s everywhere, and yet I just can’t let go of it.
A friend once said that he didn’t mind re-buying A Hundred Years of Solitude every time he wanted to re-read it because the modest cost of that far outweighed the cost of dragging the book around with him everywhere he lived. I’m not quite to that point, but it was a good argument.
April 10, 2008 at 9:23 am
When I set out traveling in 2005, I packed my top ten books and took them along with me. These were the books that I had come to love first as stories, and then as objects, who’s covers had grown familiar to my touch and who’s smell were as distinctive and pleasing as that of an excellent wine. It was easy to pick them out from the endless piles, and though I never read any of them while on the road, setting them on whatever nightstand happened to be by the bed I was sleeping in at the time instantly made the room feel more like home.
When I moved up to live here in NYC last year, however, I didn’t bring a single book with me. In part it was because I was moving up to work at a publishing house, and knew I’d be bringing books home by the cartload, but in part it was because while it was easy to select 10, how could I cull, say, 100 books from my collection? Once you pass your all time top favorites, and enter the murky realm of ‘really good’ books, it becomes an impossible task. But I do miss having them around. The instinctual urge to reach out and reference an Eliot poem or check a historical fact is checked each time by the realization that my books are back in Miami. It’s like phantom limb syndrome. I can feel them, picture them, but when I reach out–nothing there.
Though there was one time when my family moved from a larger house to a smaller one, and we rolled up our sleeves and got down to the bloody work of downsizing our collection by a third. We realized then that people in our family had gone through phases where certain books were bought voraciously for five, ten years, and then never read them again. Like my dad’s collection of 70’s and 80’s spy novels, or my mother’s Jackie Collins’-esque books that she hadn’t touched in decades. Easy to excise entire strata of books when you realize that.
April 10, 2008 at 9:24 am
When I was younger I had a friend whose mother donated her used/unwanted books to a nearby prison library. I thought that was a great idea.
April 10, 2008 at 9:33 am
Wow. It seems like everyone has a book buying obsession?
It’s more simple for me: I don’t buy a book unless I am as certain as I can be that I will like it. As for the rest (the “hmm that might be interesting”), I try to borrow them.
However, I am “helped” by one thing with more implications: I live in a non-English speaking country (Romania). So…
- book in English are more difficult to find (though it’s gotten better in the past few years)
- translated books tend to be badly translated or edited, and even when that’s not the case I’d still rather read the original; therefore, I only buy translations of books written in languages other than English (because I can’t read the original)
- books are expensive. They cost basically the same as in the US, but the salaries are several times lower, so I would much rather pay my maintenance costs.
- I already have many unread books, plus many more books I want to borrow from friends, so I can happily abstain from getting more. I usually buy less than 1 book a month, usually when I get an opportunity like a friend coming from the US (i.e. no huge shipping tax to pay).
Because of this (a bit too extensive) list of reasons, my books don’t take up more space than I have (I have just moved in a large apartment and have plenty of space for bookcases) so I don’t have to give them away. I am attached to most of them for various reasons, so unless I totally loath a book, it stays. I have given some as presents to friends who read them and really liked them, but that’s just a very small number of them.
April 10, 2008 at 9:36 am
This is something I have been struggling with now. My wife and I are moving soon, and books are a very large portion of what we have. I have been trying to weed out books that I can bear to part with, and it can be very much like a vivisection.
There are the books I have never read. I have owned some books unread for 20 years, moved from place to place to place, but never read and probably won’t. But what if I need to read it someday? What if the war with robots happens tomorrow and there are no more printed books? Would I be one of the fools to have given them away so blithely? On the other hand, the odds that I would even notice such a book missing were it to become missing is slight. I’ve been ruthless with culling these books, but it still hurts.
I have lots of books signed by authors, so I don’t want to get rid of those, even sometimes if it is a book that I don’t care all the much about. I allowed the book to be besmirched with ink, a bibliocircumsicion of sorts, so I owe it a proper life, even if it is in a cardboard box.
For some books, it is easy. Books that have influenced me or that I reread often stay. There are certain authors I would never part with (Wolfe, Moorcock, Barker, Banks, Shepard, Dick, etc.) so I lug their books with me wherever I go. I may certainly curse Moorcock’s fecundity every time I move, but those books are coming with.
Part of the difficulty getting rid of them is that I have seen what other people do to their books. (At a book signing by Harlan Ellison, a guy in front of me in line had a brand new copy of The Essential Ellison, and because he wanted the book to look well read, he deliberately broke the spine! Not once, but in several places. My soul quailed.) I could donate books to Goodwill, but they callously throw them into bins with other books. Other less worthy books. Other dog-eared, coffee-stained, beat-to-hell-by -people-that-should-suffer books.
If I knew they were going to some kid just discovering the sense of awe that great weird fiction can engender, I would be content. That they could be sandwiched between copies of The South Beach Diet and the latest Danielle Steele book makes me cry.
April 10, 2008 at 9:40 am
PaperbackSwap.com, dude! It’s fun, and you know that the people who get your books really want them. Good stuff.
April 10, 2008 at 9:56 am
I hoard all my books, against the apocalypse.
When the seas rise and the nukes fall and civilization collapses, I will still have every book I ever bought, and the mutants and the scavenger gangs will look to me as the last repository of human knowledge.
You suckers who’ve been “sharing” and “donating your books to good causes” will have to call me King.
April 10, 2008 at 9:59 am
I pass some books along to my mother, others to friends, but the majority of paperbacks go to the Women’s Prison Book Project. Tax deductible, and I feel like they’ll get read that way. http://www.wpbp.org/
April 10, 2008 at 10:05 am
I put up more shelves. Then I extend the shelving into another room, and another, and another. Then when they are all full, I intend buying a bigger house … and then I’ll build an extension … and then I’ll buy an even bigger house … Eventually there’ll just be this vast castle stuffed with books, and little me ghosting around among them until one day there’ll be nothing left of us but dust …
April 10, 2008 at 11:25 am
I go through phases of hoarding and not-hoarding. Sometimes there’s no choice and I have to make decisions. Some of its easy - ones I didn’t like go to the second hand stores, hopefully to find a more appreciate audience than me and I in turn get credit to waste on yet more books!
Other times I have to clear the shelves, make space, and then I sell books I really loved. Then I cry.
April 10, 2008 at 11:34 am
that would be a more appreciative audience…
April 10, 2008 at 11:41 am
I keep them if I read them and liked them, or I might someday read them, or if they were awful but might warrant a re-read, maybe, in some hypothetical future. I cannot give up a book.
I do loan them to friends, so I’m not a complete book curmudgeon. Still, I find myself wondering if it is worth sharing with mouth breathers who crease pages or bend the spines. I do not like libraries because the books come banged up to begin with, and then they demand them back. Bastards.
April 10, 2008 at 11:54 am
I have more books I haven’t read yet sitting around than books I’ve read. When I finish one, it goes into one of various piles: For My Bookworm Kid, For My Husband, For Friends Who Might Enjoy Them, For the Friend Who’s Supporting Herself With Ebay Sales While Her Worker’s Disability Case Is Up In the Air, and finally the fairly small Books I Never Want to Part With pile. (Even that pile gets decimated every now and then when I realize I know someone who would really love this book or that one. Sometimes I buy them their own copy, sometimes I just hand over my own.)
The only exception is certain types of nonfiction that I may need to refer back to. That’s what takes up the most space in this house.
These days, what book storage problem I do have is getting to be less of a problem—half the books I read are ebooks, which is a solution that works well for me because 1. I’m lucky to be able to read off a PDA screen for hours with no discomfort and 2. I don’t have a strong physical attachment to books. Upside: ebooks take up no extra space–my Palm is going to be 4.76″ x 3.08″ x 0.61″ whether I have one or 2,500 books on it; likewise, my hard drives are going to take up their little bit of space whether I have one or 500,000 books on them. Downside: not as easy to foist on friends. Even if I have something DRM-free that I can pass along, only my husband and one of my friends will read ebooks.
(Incidentally, I’d so pay to get the nonfiction books I have stacked on shelves in ebook formats. Woohoo—search functionality!)
April 10, 2008 at 12:28 pm
For years I managed to avoid the need to cull my books, simply by being creative with how I stored them all - but there’s only so much space. And many, many books. So culling became inevitable. But the first time - boy, that was hard. Agonizing over every single tattered, held-together-with-love-and-sellotape paperback…it took me most of a day to put together a measly stack of maybe fifty books (out of around 600, although it would be upwards of 3000 now) that I could just about bring myself to part with.
Now, I cull my library at least once a year, and more importantly, I only buy books I know I’ll read (though I too have books I bought ten, fifteen years ago that I still haven’t read…) I find it easier to get rid of collections and anthologies; I read more short fiction than novels, so overlap makes it easy to keep at least one copy of those stories I know I’ll re-read again and again. On the other hand, there are books I’ve kept and will keep because they contain one special story I haven’t found a copy of elsewhere. Just one story out of a dozen, even two dozen.
And of course there’s my core library, those books, regardless of age, condition, or anything else, that will always be with me. Sure, I could head over to Amazon and order a shinny new copy of The Count of Monte-Cristo, but it won’t be MY copy, the copy I spent a week enthralled by in 1988, the copy I’ve re-read at least 15 times in the last 20 years. And that’s one example out of thousands….
As to what I do with all the culled volumes - I pass them on to friends, donate them to charity shops, or sell them on. It depends. I’ll occasionally hold onto a book I know I’ll never read again because it’s a first or limited edition, or signed, but those go into storage. The books I surround myself with, the books surrounding me now, are there because I either haven’t read them yet (too many!) or because I’ve read them and loved them, and so this is where they belong.
April 10, 2008 at 1:19 pm
I do not get rid of books. I have 44 bookcases crammed to the gills. I have books in every closet in the house. I have books in every nook and cranny, in piles here and piles there, double- and triple-shelved. I’d buy more bookcases, but first I’d have to buy more walls. And still the desire for ever more and more books burns unquenchable inside me.
April 10, 2008 at 1:34 pm
I love my books. Some I have kept for a very long time others I cycle through. Of all of my stuff only the cats had provided more happiness and longer use. I’m not getting them nearly as quickly as i used to though. I miss working at a bookstore and knowing all the good book sales in town. There are lots of good stores here in SF but buying retail as opposed to books by the pound really does slow me down. There’s a small pile of stuff to be kept always and not lent out which includes really old copies of the King in Yellow, signed Tufte books and a few other odds and ends. We also keep a shelf of Agatha Christie & Terry Pratchett specifically for loaning out which has proved helpful for friends for air travel and hospital waiting rooms. My husband and I did not dedupe our collections until we got married and even then there are somethings that i kept multiple copies of. We usually give away or donate books. When we moved out of a 2 bedroom apt we had 60+ bankers boxes of books. We held a private giveaway for friends and then a public giveaway in the hallway of our 7 story apt building. We got rid of about 14 boxes of books that way. The rest a friend picked up for the Stoneridge booksale. My fantasy home would have lots of rooms with floor to ceiling shelves. Right now we have only 5 large + 1 small bookcase. I am plotting to stuff the DVDs somewhere hard to find so that there will be more room for precious books.
April 10, 2008 at 1:39 pm
I love my books and I have kept them all with the exception for the ones that I didn’t like. (Often that has come back to kick me in the butt when I “hear” about it and buy it again and realize that I still don’t like it). My books are everywhere, on walls, tucked into corners, piled places. I probably should invest and convert my living room to a library but I haven’t gotten around to that yet.
April 10, 2008 at 2:47 pm
These are all incredible answers, and they’re giving me a lot to think about. I wanted to let you know that I’ve updated this post to include a link to some larger pictures of one of my book cases.
It’s here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/mattormeg/BooksAndBooks08
April 10, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Awesome pictures Matt! I spy some of Jeff’s work and Little Horn, Big Shaggy in there. Still need to read that one.
April 10, 2008 at 5:17 pm
My wife is the type that would get all of our books from the library if she could, but I have to own them and keep them…..which has led to some marital strain. We have a few doubled-up book shelves (two rows of paper backs) but have put many in boxes. When (if) the kids ever move out, one of their rooms will become a true library with permanent shelving and I’ll be able to liberate them from their crates.
My buying/reading ratio is probably in the 5:1 range, but I love to always have a lot of great choices as to what to read next.
I see mostly hard covers in the posted pictures, but I’d say mine are 75 percent paperback at least…
April 10, 2008 at 5:38 pm
I have only about 1500 books, so they’re easy to store stacked about 8 ft. high in a walk-in closet and on six bookcases. I keep most of what I acquire, since generally I “research” before I buy a book and the review copies are often interesting enough to save for another if I decide I’d rather read something else.
I do give away books on occasion, mostly to a very close female friend of mine living in Serbia, since she has much the same perverse tastes in books as I do.
April 10, 2008 at 8:30 pm
I cull every ten years or so. The criteria for removal are:
1. Do I want to read this book again
2. It’s an embarrassment now, though it may not have been once.
As I started collecting books about 40 years ago, I have a huge collection mostly in paperback. Over time, a lot of my books have become modern first editions, so I certainly don’t get rid of those. I may need them to support me in my old age.
These days I mostly reread books rather than purchasing new ones. There’s no room for them anyway.
April 10, 2008 at 10:20 pm
I’ve only ever gotten rid of one box of books, and I’ve regretted it ever since. Now I keep all of ‘em. Admittedly, my collection isn’t as big as some other people who have commented here, though my study doesn’t have all that much room left. A house full of books is no bad thing however …
April 10, 2008 at 10:22 pm
I made a rule not to buy books unless I had either A. Read it and loved it. or B. Wanted to read it and couldn’t get it at the library. It cut down on the painful book purges, after which I always had to rebuy some of the books I got rid of.
I take unwanted books to Changing Hands (Independent bookstore in Tempe, AZ) and Bookman’s, both of which will give me store credit for the ones they want. Anything beyond that will go to Goodwill.
One time we stored some hardback books that we didn’t have room for on the back porch, and the roof leaked and they got damaged. I confess, we burned them (and it was difficult to do.) Most of them were Robert Jordan books though, and after reading ten of them, I had a little anger to work through.
April 11, 2008 at 2:38 am
I never keep books I’ve read unless it’s for reference purposes.
Once I finish a book it goes straight on Amazon, gets passed on to friends or goes to charity. I can’t stand clutter and I have no interest in acquiring material possessions simply for the pleasure of having them. It’s so rare that I’ll re-read a book that there’s little sense in keeping any of them.
This doesn’t mean I have a book-free existence though as I will splurge and buy second hand books and have a load of them sitting around before I read them but even these have a limited shelf-life. After a couple of months I’ll most likely put them back on Amazon whence they came.
April 11, 2008 at 11:51 am
I donate to the library. I used to donate all my read but my top ten, but the top ten seems to add another top ten every year. I know have a top fifty, but only the top ten are ranked. No one touches the top ten. However, in the past two years, my office is full of books so they’ve spread to other rooms. I think they multiply when I’m not looking, and strangely, my checking account gets smaller around the same time I find new books laying around the house.
April 13, 2008 at 3:50 pm
I used to manage a new and used independent bookstore a few years ago and my passion for books has only grown since then, along with my collection. I’ve about 3500 books and no intention of paring down - instead my husband and I continue to buy more bookcases and, sometimes, buy larger houses. It’s one of the first considerations when moving: where will all the books go?
April 24, 2008 at 7:26 am
*late to the party, but can’t resist adding*
I lean heavily on the local library. I don’t buy a book unless I’ve read it and decided I couldn’t do without owning a copy, or know it’s definitely worth owning. Or if it’s incredibly rare. No regrets about buying E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, and both male and female editions of Milorad Pavic’s The Dictionary of the Khazars here!
I don’t buy many books but I’m highly picky about editions, covers and formats - I’m a sucker for large formats and rare printings.
I pray the day when I’m forced to cull my library will never come.
Oh… and I LOVE Jeff and Ann’s book sales. If anyone on this post wants to sell portions of their library, they definitely would get a good home with this buyer… ;)