Books - getting rid of them.... Where to start?

[ciao_yall]

For various reasons I don't currently have an on-campus office, and I'm not sure I will have all the bookshelves I did when All This is over.

Boxes of books are now stacked up at my place and I genuinely don't have space for them. I was able to dump a whole bunch of odds and ends from one box, but now we're getting complicated.

These aren't books I have read in a while, but I like having them. They remind me of the professors I had, the classmates I met, the reasons I bought them... like a curated museum collection of my professional life. Not worth much to anyone but me... still... the thought of no longer having them is bothersome.

Have any of you done a big book purge?

If so, what did you keep and why?

What were you ready to let go of?

[apl68]

I occasionally do minor book purges.  Every so often I get rid of anywhere from a couple to an armload of items I don't need.  They're mostly recent acquisitions that I've decided aren't keepers that I might really want to re-read someday.  Most books that I buy end up not being keepers.  I do this on purpose to try to keep my book accumulation within reasonable limits.

Now and then I'll also go back through my shelves and get rid of a few items that I'd kept and later decided I don't really need to keep anymore.  I guess you could say that I weed my private collection on an occasional ongoing basis, the way we weed materials at a public library.  I've always preferred to think of "weeding" as "pruning" myself.  We're not pulling out unwanted stuff that sneaked into the collection when we weren't looking--we're cutting off old growth that has outlived its usefulness to make way for new growth.

[dismalist]

Yes, similar circumstances. Upon retirement I had to give up a decent sized office full of books. I donated them to the library. Couldn't take them home because house is full of wife's books!

I preserved for home some classics [not every word read], a few favorites [to go back to], and a tiny number of contemporary texts [for reference].

All the books I buy now are Kindle versions.

[mamselle]

In this respect, you are me.

I've come up with a few solutions/strategies/things-to-try-every-now-and-again...

First, there are a bunch of little book-holder "free libraries" in my area, and my morning walks take me past several. (There's also one for seed and gardening supplies...) I'll pull 8 or 10 at a time and put them in my bag and put them into one of the free libraries on my way back.

There's a library branch at the end of my street that used to take books for their book sale, but they stopped for awhile, and now only take them when they're open (the bin has been re-purposed for overnight video returns) but if I'm clear on a day they're open, I'll take a box there. (They only accept one box a day, understandably).

I'm also starting to go deeper into the piles: the first round was sort of easy, but I'll be digging in deeper now, and the thing I've done a couple times before moving is to cull shelf-by-shelf, book-case-by-book-case, taking a few days on each one to consider if I will use it for any of the article/book projects still on my life list, if it has sentimental value that still holds, or if its sentimental values have lived out their shelf-life and can enrich someone else's lives (and shelves).

Those, too, go to the entry way by the "walking bag," and I take them out bit by bit.

At some point, I'll probably have to do more, but at the moment, this reduces the bulk and keeps me at it...not every day, but every so often.

I know there are also places that do pickups and take books in larger numbers, but they aren't good for short-term needs if you're in a hurry (might be fine otherwise): I ended up with a couple of hundred books in bags from a friend's move after the people kept putting off the pickup.

There are also a couple of organizations that supply books to libraries in Africa and South America of which I'm aware, I'd have to look up contacts, but they go to schools and orphanages that make use of them for teaching purposes.

M.   

[Puget]

For various reasons I don't currently have an on-campus office, and I'm not sure I will have all the bookshelves I did when All This is over.

Boxes of books are now stacked up at my place and I genuinely don't have space for them. I was able to dump a whole bunch of odds and ends from one box, but now we're getting complicated.

These aren't books I have read in a while, but I like having them. They remind me of the professors I had, the classmates I met, the reasons I bought them... like a curated museum collection of my professional life. Not worth much to anyone but me... still... the thought of no longer having them is bothersome.

Have any of you done a big book purge?

If so, what did you keep and why?

What were you ready to let go of?

It sounds like you are holding onto them more for the memories associated with them rather than from any likelihood that you will read them again. If so, you could consider taking a picture of each and writing down the associated memory, then getting ride of the books themselves.

[jerseyjay]

There was a letter in the current AHA Perspectives by a historian who just retired about his books. According to the editorial note, this prompted a lively discussion online (I suppose on the AHA listserv).

Several professors in my school have retired after several decades of teaching. One left a bookshelf full of books and journals in her office after she left. Since I got her office, I wasn't particularly happy. Another had a "book giveaway" in the department. Of course, hundreds of books were not taken and it was up to the departmental secretary to figure out what to do with them. (I think she found somebody who shipped books to African schools, although I am not sure how useful these were.) There was a bookshelf of books left by an adjunct, which (after several years) got made part of the "book giveaway" and then sent to Africa, also. Another long-time professor retired and donated much of her books to a center on campus that she was affiliated with.

I have never had that many books to get rid of, but I do purge my books occasionally. I generally purge novels and academic books that I do not think I will need. I usually generate about 10-20 boxes of unwanted books. Here are some of things that I have tried.
-Donating them to used bookstores. (Especially community bookstores.)
-Donating them to Goodwill or the Salvation Army.
-Leaving a box at a time out in the English department (where this seems to be common).
-I once came upon 50 boxes of children's books, which I donated to a center in the school of education that focuses on early childhood literacy (I think they donated some to schools and sold some for money.)
-When I was living in Latin America for several years and then moved back to the US, I donated the various books and magazines I had collected to the local university's English department.
-When I decided that I did not need the years' worth of academic journals that I could download from the internet, I used them for a class activity for my advanced students (find an academic article, find its sources, find how does it cite the sources, find the thesis, etc.)

Like most academics, I have collected a large amount of books in my specialty. (I am a historian). When I decide to get rid of them, I would like to donate them to either another scholar, to a library that might want them, or to a school abroad that might be interested. Since I am not planning on retiring soon, I have not investigated. My will indicates what I want done with my books. But I do try to purge my books every so often.

[apl68]

Mamselle raises a good point regarding donations to public libraries--it's best not to bring in an overwhelming number at one time.  At least once a year we get a donation that is awkwardly large--a half dozen shelves of material or more.  It's easier on us to receive a box or two at a time.

Little free libraries can be good places to donate a few items at a time.  There's a county seat about 40 miles away that I visit now and then that has two of them on the courthouse square.  The books I drop off there are always gone the next time I pass through.  Judging from the junk that is left on the shelves for long periods of time, it appears that they don't regularly clear them out, so I guess that means that somebody actually wants my donations.  I've gotten the occasional item there as well.

When I was in grad school I occasionally visited the home of one of my advisors.  He had thousands of books squirreled away in every corner of the house.  I even saw stacks of them on the edges of each step on the stairs.  He was an historian who specialized in a certain nation that he had often visited.  That's where a great deal of that material came from.  He boasted that this collection of rare books, newspapers, and ephemera on this nation was unique.  Late in life he donated it to our university, where it became a substantial special collection.  It even has its own web page.  He also had some photos that made it into the Library of Congress.

[Morden]

I use little free libraries to find new homes for popular books; for more academic/specialized books, you might consider taking a bag into class and dumping them on a table for students to take. At the end of class, I would just remove the left overs. I did that consistently one term (because I knew I was moving offices), and found that lateness went down because they wanted to be there for the free books. They didn't take everything, but I got rid of quite a lot that way.

[mamselle]

Oh, I forgot, along those lines: When we were clearing my folks' place, one of my mom's great-uncles had apparently taught German at some point and she had all his beautiful old, tiny, Bible-paper textbooks from the late 1800s.

This was in Columbus, OH, so I called the OSU German department and asked if they could use them. They said they had a permanent 'free books' exchange table outside the department chair's door and I was welcome to drop them off there; apparently grad students in particular haunted that table..

I took them in two loads. The second trip, nearly all the books I'd brought the first time were gone. So I figured they'd gone to the right place.

M.

[Juvenal]

All the books that I've brought home over the years?  The shelves have filled; small heaps rise from the floor of several rooms.  Disposing of them (once I'm no longer around) seems nearly impossible in prospect for my executors.  Why not deal with this now, while I'm  still animate?  Take a visit to my basement and its ranks of books.  Sigh.

The only answer I have is "a Dumpster."  Almost all of my books are just so much paper mass.  Oh, a handful have some bibliographic interest, but no one would latterly care enough to winnow them, with the dross so pre-eminent.

My local library will take a handful, but not much more than that.  There is no used book mart of any use nearby.  As a vexing example, I have fat crates of paperback science fiction (youthful trash enthusiasm), but the thought of even Craig's List to deal with them makes me weary.

"To your scattered trash heaps go!"

[AvidReader]

My brother-in-law used to buy lots (in the auction sense, not the abundance sense) of used books on eBay. A seller would list a box of "20 classic American novels, including XYZ," with a few photos, then let people bid on them. Do people still do this? I would absolutely buy a lot of 20 classic science fiction books if I were lucky enough to see it.

Some of my colleagues' wives in graduate school also did craft projects with old books, so if your books are now just "mass," perhaps someone you know would like some for creative purposes.

AR.

[mamselle]

In fact art books are a serious pursuit now: one person I know has exhibited books with overlaid pages, fold-out maps, portrait insertions and collages.

Others create sculpted page-work by successively folding them into origami-like shapes.

Best for this are hard-bound, with non-colored inks (other than black) with intact bindings.

M.

[Ruralguy]

You know, I just moved, and I got rid of a lot of stuff I hadn't touched in a while and would never have looked at again. In fact, I really still have too much and will likely get rid of even more in the coming months.

[Parasaurolophus]

Like apl68, I've started pruning my personal collection periodically.. a while after I run out of immediate shelf space. it takes me a while to feel like I can let go of things. I periodically feed the little free libraries.

But my mother and I also inherited ~13 000 books from my grandparents (most of them pretty academic). And I dunno what to do about those (I have and will have zero interest in most of the subjects). I might be able to get rid of most of them at this point, but I wouldn't want to just throw them out, so...

[kaysixteen]

A related question for you all here might be this: as you age, are you reading less (not counting works read specifically for professional work) for pleasure?  Are you reading more periodicals and less books, esp online ones?