Why Can’t We Throw Away Books?
By, Nate Pepper
I love to read. More precisely, I love books. Always have. As a child, my room was lined with homemade shelves. When I visit a new city I instinctively head to the public library, just to browse. Every room in our house is packed with bookshelves, filled to capacity, spilling onto the floor.
I come by this honestly. My parents’ house looks much the same. My mother has been a librarian and bookseller for many years, and her thoughtful care packages continue to compound the problem. At some early point in my life I fantasized about owning a Victorian library full of leather-bound volumes and rolling ladders to reach the highest shelves. An antiquated vision from a bygone era. It was time to get real.
Which I why I have recently started a project to declutter and make room on my bookshelves. It was not an easy task for someone who has dragged boxes of books through a half-dozen household moves.
Very quickly I realized two things that were going to make the book-purge project difficult.
First, there aren’t many outlets for used books. Trapped between demographic and technological trends, traditional outlets to offload books have become completely saturated. Try to sell a book. I dare you. Try to give them away – not easy. What if you have a van load? Forget about it.
Sell them to a used bookstore? Maybe a few choice volumes. Give them to the library? Their donation room is full. Schools? Not a chance. Yard sales? People speed by the book bin to paw through orphaned phone chargers. I’m exaggerating slightly, but demand for paper books has severely declined while household downsizing and digital adoption are loading up the market.
That brings me to the second challenge:
No one feels comfortable throwing away a book. Certainly not me. From an early age, it was drilled into me not to write in books or dog-ear pages, let alone throw one away. I suspect this is something of a cultural taboo, at least in the U.S. Physical printed books are synonymous with learning, opportunity and freedom of speech. To casually discard, or worse, destroy a book is disrespectful and undemocratic.
And of course, anyone who has read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 or watched Star Trek knows books must be hoarded for the inevitable apocalypse, when they will become our last thread of civilization.
Why are we so hesitant to discard a book? We don’t have the same attachment to a broken phone or a worn-out sweater. I think we confuse the content of a book with the physical object of a book. Until recently they were inseparable. The printed page and the word were one in the same. Today the content of a book is an independent concept. Whether you own a volume or not, the work lives on in digital form, audio recordings, or heck, even available on Amazon Used for $0.01, plus shipping. The physical book on your shelf? Recycle it. It’s just paper. I love cereal, but if I want Frosted Flakes I go to the grocery store, I don’t have to hoard it in my cellar.
So, I resolved to downsize my book collection. I mean, thousands of volumes. Before you object, I found homes for most of them, through a broad network of charities, libraries, schools, and the odd midnight stealth drop on friends’ doorsteps.
It felt… strange… uncomfortable… but ultimately liberating. Confronted by empty bookshelves for the first time in my life. Secure in the knowledge that boxes of unread books were not slowly decaying in the basement.
I used four questions to help guide my sorting process, taking each book one at a time:
1) Does this book belong to someone else? I mean, let’s get real. Even I am not crazy enough to give away my wife’s books!
2) Am I likely to re-read it? Your experience may vary, but I rarely re-read books, even my favorites.
3) Does this physical book have special meaning to me, or just the content? Signed volumes, personal gifts or especially beautiful books stayed because their physical form gives me joy and comfort. Books I liked for their content, see #4 below.
4) Is it irreplaceable? Rare or limited edition books, or those that were out of print, I generally kept. For example, specific regionally genealogies that are difficult to come by, or books self-published by friends. However, that paper back copy of Cat’s Cradle, no matter how much I love the story, can be had on Kindle or via Amazon Prime overnight. There is no reason to store it in my home indefinitely on the odd chance I might someday have a sudden craving to read Vonnegut!
If the answer to any of these questions was “Yes,” I kept the book. Now that those special few have a little space to breathe, I enjoy them more. They’re easier to find. In fact, I uncovered quite a few fun surprises that had been lost or stuck at the back of shelves. I even made a special section of “To be read’ books to help organize future reading.
The rest went in the bin – to be parceled out as previously described. A few particularly useless pulp novels, I actually brought myself to recycle. I hope they’ll come back as a corrugated box, and bring me a fresh fix from Amazon one day.
I guess that’s why we find it so hard to throw away books. Because books mean so much, and bring so much joy in such small packages.
Next month we tackle the kids’ bookshelves. Wish me luck!
Nate Pepper reads to himself and his children during long winters in upstate New York. He prefers paper to plastic.
