Divesting

Way back last summer I started a Project.

I am a historian by trade and my main form of relaxation is reading. One of my favorite activities is to go to used book stores and see what I can find that looks interesting and costs me next to nothing. I tend to hang on to the things I acquire. And when you combine all of these things you end up at a place where my office is pretty much full to the brim with books, many of which I will never read again and which have no particular sentimental value.

They were standing in the way of further book acquisitions, and so they had to go. Plus, being on the clearing-out end of my parents’ stuff did sort of bring home the idea that perhaps I should do some of that while I am still healthy to spare my children from the same task. At least some of the same task, anyway.

So I went through the bookshelves and took out all of the ones that I didn’t see myself keeping. The “just in case” books. The “that might be useful someday” books. The “this wasn’t something I hated but neither was it something I plan to revisit” books. The “what the hell is this still doing on my shelves?” books. The “what was this book about again?” books. And then I took the books that I wanted to keep – many of which had been piled in corners or on the floor prior to this – and put them on the shelves, in a pleasing order.

This did require a few bookshelf purchases, but by the end of the summer – for the first time since we moved into this house in 1996 – all of my books were out of boxes, off the floor, and accessible to the casual browser.

The rest I put in boxes and stashed down in the basement. There were a lot of boxes. There they stayed while more pressing things occupied my time. Life is like that, I suppose.

This weekend, though, it was Time. A while back a friend had recommended a bookstore in Madison that does a lot of community literacy work, so I called and asked them if they still accepted donations. “Sure!” they said. “Is it a big collection?”

“Yeah, I suppose so.”

“Well, if it’s more than 50 books that would count.”

“Oh, my sweet summer child. This is 20 boxes of books.”

“…?”

“…!”

“…”

"If you took them out and repacked them there’s probably about 16 boxes worth that you can actually use,” I told them. “You can have them for free, but you have to take them all. That’s the deal. I just want them out of my house.”

Thus are bargains struck.

We drove up there on Sunday and eventually found the place – an unassuming brown building that looked more like a house than a shop – and wandered in. It seemed like a very nice place. If I hadn’t been dropping stuff off I’d have stayed to pick up more. Perhaps another time.

I let the much younger staff people handle getting the books out of the van and into their shop, and eventually it was done.

It felt pretty good, really. I hope they find new homes and new readers.

And now I can buy more books to replace them.