My Own Private Book Purge

Coincidentally, as Marie Kondo was inspiring a flurry of discussion about purging books, I was living it.

This past summer, my wife surprised me for my birthday by corralling a number of my friends to install five IKEA Billy bookshelves in my would-be study while I was gone at a conference (as well as assemble a couple shelves we already had). They even put as many books on the shelves as possible. Since then, I've installed three more myself and slowly been organizing them. Over six months later, and I'm not quite done, though I am pretty close. (I basically just have to do my comic books, but that will require at least one more Billy, I suspect.)

I have a lot of books. After the surprise shelving, one of my friends thanked me: "I used to worry I had too many books, but now I know I'll never have as many as you do." As of this writing, I own 2,663 according to my LibraryThing. Getting rid of books has been a major problem for me over the years. I basically refuse to do it. After all, I could reread them all someday! Even though it's pretty unlikely I'll ever want to reread, say, any of my Star Wars YA novels, or even The Silmarillion.

Partly it's a collector thing too. I have a complete run of Star Wars: Jedi Apprentice; I'm not going to just give that up! Sometimes people post on web forums I frequent: "I used to have a complete collection of The New Doctor Who Adventures, but I sold it off years ago to make room. Now I'm hunting them all down again." I view these kind of posts as horror stories, dark visions of my own future. What if I purge Jedi Apprentice but ten years from now am wracked with guilt and want to reassemble it?

Weirdly, it wasn't packing up my books that made me realize there were some I really could do without, but unpacking them. Packing had to go fast, but shelving has been-- as indicated-- a slow, often judicious process. I've had to track down stuff that ended up in different parts of the house, and for my nonfiction in particular, I had to come up with a good shelving system. This caused me wonder about individual books: did I really need each and every one?

There were two main categories of book I became skeptical of. One was duplicates: I have the edition of Nevil Shute's On the Beach I bought in a used bookstore, and I have the more recent edition I got as a desk copy when I taught it. I have The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, but I also have individual volumes of Hamlet, Macbeth, and some others. I have two different editions of The Mill on the Floss, both very beat up 1970s paperbacks (I think both were free). I decided I could bear to part with one of each of these duplicates when I had no compelling reason to hang on to both copies.

(You can see all of my remaining what LibraryThing calls "Work duplicates" here.* I usually held onto two copies when an older one had a sentimental value, but a newer one was useful in some way. Like, I kept the copy of I, Robot my dad gave me, but I have a newer one I used when teaching it.)

I also realized I didn't need so many textbooks. I actually had two I'd been lugging around since high school! I don't know why. I suspect because at first, I felt like I might look something up in them again. But at no point in the past fifteen years have I ever used my high school poetry textbook, and my high school writing handbook is surely woefully out of date. I also had a number from college, mostly education textbooks I hadn't sold back at the time for whatever reasons. But surely I was never going to use my speech textbook from the class I took on how to teach speech, much less my 2004 copy of the Ohio Department of Education's academic content standards for K-12 language arts education.

Also in my early grad school days, I went crazy at the annual "book fair," scooping up as many complimentary copies of textbooks as publishers would let me get away with. Eventually I realized that obtaining free copies of composition anthologies is a curse, not a blessing, because then you have a completely useless, terrible book that technically speaking you're obligated to not resell.

So I packed all these books, plus some other ones that I didn't want for whatever reason, into a box and I actually had about 35 of them. I wish I'd written down a list, or at least taken a picture. I know 35 doesn't sound like a lot-- it's just over 1% of my collection, but for me it was quite a number, surely the most books I've ever gotten rid of. So I've been pretty proud of myself, even though I know I am no Marie Kondo.

I even managed to sell some of them-- I got $15 for some of the non-textbooks at the truly excellent Mojo Books and Records, and $5 for a Broadview anthology I didn't even pay for at a used textbook store. The rest of the non-textbooks I donated to my local library, and the textbook store took my leftover textbooks for donation. (I asked "where do the donated books go?" and the cashier said, "good question." I am skeptical anyone wants even a free copy of The Essay Connection.)

Of course, store credit means you need to buy something, and I bought four books at Mojo (sf was buy 3, get 1 free, how could I not!). I also grabbed a free sf novel from a bin by the door on my way out of the textbook store. But it's still progress, I suppose.

* The list is a little misleading: some of those works are in other collections; I actually own zero copies of Batman: Year One for instance, but I've borrowed it from my friend James and the library, and thus catalogued it twice in my "Read but unowned" collection.