Self-Discipline

I made a decision sometime in college to try hard not to be a person who accumulates books.  This is difficult for me, because I read a lot and people give me books and I buy books.  (I am also trying not to be a person who buys books, but this one is hard for me.)  Checking books out of the library is a good solution.  As is giving a lot of books away, pretty regularly.  Anyway, I feel that I am succeeding in my quest.  This is a picture of my bookshelf.  It is not my only bookshelf, but the other one contains only journals and diaries, things written by me, which I don't mind accumulating.  Besides the books pictured here, I have about 10 books from law school in the basement, and about 15 other books -- an atlas, dictionary, some art books, and the pile of books at my bedside that I'm currently reading or about to read.  So, I'm not doing as well as I could, but I'm doing a pretty good job.  I think this is a reasonable number of books to own.  I hope not to own more than this number of books ever.  I'll have to get rid of a bunch of these particular books, which aren't especially worthy, and eventually I'll replace them with books I never want to get rid of.  But I want to limit the size of my collection.  There is no virtue in owning books.  Repeat after me.  There is no virtue in owning books.  It is hard for me to remember sometimes, but there is really no virtue in owning books.  Nope.    

Comments

[James]

Have you tried bookcrossing? It's the coolest way to get rid of books.

[Another Country Heard From]

Virtue? What does virtue have to do with it? There is joy in owning books and rereading old favorites. If I didn't keep them, I'd have to buy them again and again since my tastes and the library's don't always (or often) coincide.

[misspixie]

For those of us who move a lot, there is a sort of masochism in acquiring books. But I love to reread and find great joy in owning books that I can dip in and out of, so I take heed of Neil Rudenstine's comments that as habits go, buying books is one of the less egregious or expensive ones.

[Jill]

Cannot...accept...concept. These appear to be strings of English words, but their meaning is incompresible.

;)

[Jill]

Incomprehensible.

[Dan]

Some books are worth keeping, others are worth reading, but not necessarily worth keeping. Some are neither worth reading or keeping...but good for propping up the short leg on the dining room table.. :D

Another good place to send books, if you don't want/need them is bookthing.org. But, given that you're down east, and bookthing.org is in Baltimore, it probably isn't a good option for you. but I figured I'd give them a good plug anyway.

[PG]

My room in my parents' house is still "my" room, despite being much cleaner most of the year than it ever was or is during my active tenure there, and I keep nearly all of my books there. If they ever sell the white elephant and move into a small retired-people kind of place, I'll have to figure out what to do with them, but as it is, it's almost as nice to be welcomed home by my books as by my family (and the former are much less complicated).

[hilllady]

Gah! My books weigh more than all my other possessions combined, not counting my car, and it's...not...enough...

[g]

Books have onther uses you know. Haven't you ever heard of thermal mass?

[Bill Altreuter]

Acquiring a library is a decent ancillary life's work. The trick is to avoid being buried in stuff that has no personal meaning. In my house there are the books that my wife came to the relationship with, the (far more) books that I brought, and the books we have acquired since. We also have a pretty extensive selection of children's books-- from my childhood, and the childhood's of our daughters. These later will be passed on to their children, which is a pretty way to ensure that there will always be people who grew up reading the things we loved.

We could stand some thinning, but the real problem are the books that just seem to show up. They are hard to get rid of, but if you do not have a personal connection to a book then you should probably get rid of it. It's okay to throw them out-- old law school books especially.

Someday I'll be dead, and my children will go through my stuff and some of it they will keep and some of it they will throw away, but I want my library to remind them of me.

[christine]

i agree, sherry, and libraries make this goal entirely possible.

[Al Wheeler]

There is no virtue at all in owning books. They're an inexpensive commodity. The important part is what's in your head after you read them.
I used to go one step further, reading a couple of hundred pages on intercontinental flights, and ripping those pages out at the end of the flight so I wouldn't have to carry the entire book the rest of the trip. That was my excuse anyway. The real reason was the pleasure in watching people's eyes pop out when they saw me ripping my book in half and tossing the read part out.

[Marcin]

Why not own the books you've read? Mostly I read books from the library, but that's a habit drawn from economic necessity.

[Amy]

I'm a librarian, and even I think that some books are worth owning! There's a great pleasure in being able to write comments in the margins of your own books and discover them later.

Personally, I check out current fiction from my library but have a decent collection of well-loved and annotated classics and spiritual books.

[pjm]

It's a tough concept. I ruthlessly (I thought) culled my books when we moved out of the apartment-with-a-wall-of-bookshelves, but I've still got between three and four times as many as you have in this bookcase.

I understand the idea; every time I move, I wish I only had a little bookcase to move, as I once did. But every time I go back to the shelf and pull out something I once loved, and rediscover it, I'm glad it's around.

(Plus, I haven't figured out any way to work around the diplomacy of giving away books given to me as gifts.)

[Allison]

Such a tiny book collection! I couldn't stand it! Books are so much more than clutter - they're concrete memory storage units, waiting to be reread for content and memory links (where was I when I read this last? Is this a book I read every Christmas? Who gave this to me? Why did I think this was important to buy? etc.). They're beautiful as home decorations, interesting to your friends, comfortable for you... I just don't understand the need to purge, as if the simple act of owning things is bad. It isn't. If you don't love your books, by all means get rid of them - but I can't help but suspect you are indeed a book lover. What fuels the urge to have almost no books?

[will]

wow. I am not sure we can still be friends....

[hilllady]

If we all stopped buying books, who would feed the starving writers?

[Bill Altreuter]

Allison makes a good point-- I like the way the books in my house look, and I like seeing books in other people's houses. Anyone visiting us would be able to assimilate a sense of our interests. I'm always a little weirded out when I go into a house and don't see books (or hear music, but that's a different story). "What do these people read?" I think to myself. How are they able to spend time in a place where there are no books?

I am trying to cull, but it is slow going. I find myself instead picking up something that I haven't seen in a while-- or worse, a stack of books that seem to be in need of revisiting.

[ijk]

To your, "there is no virtue," I offer, "A private library is the single most significant thing most of us will ever build."

A collection does not need to be valuble, or huge, or anything *except* special to the person building it. As much as I love and respect you, I could not disagree with you more on this issue. There is no (or at least, little) virtue in an accumulation of books. There is tremendous virtue in owning a collection of books.

A pile of books on your shelves are far different from a collection of volumes that *mean* something to you. (Disclaimer: I am obviously somewhat biased on this point as a rare book dealer specializing in library/collection development (See, e.g., http://www.luxmentis.com/aboutus.htm)).