Department of library de-acquisitions
There’s a great passage in the first chapter of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler in which the unnamed Reader (always addressed in the second person) enters a bookstore and is confronted by the intimidating legions of Books You Haven’t Read. Calvino arrays them into categories, including:
the Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For A Long Time,
the Books You’ve Been Seeking For Years Without Finding Them,
the Books About Something That Interests You At The Present Moment,
the Books You’d Like To Have On Hand Just In Case,
the Books You Could Put Away To Read Maybe This Summer,
the Books You Need To Go With Other Books In Your Bookshelf,
the Books That Inspire In You A Sudden, Frantic, And Not Exactly Justifiable Curiosity.*
I suspect that a lot of bibliophiles have this passage at least partially memorized. Having been ruthlessly culling my book collection in preparation for the move (query: how many boxes of books before the movers’ fees go high enough to clean out your bank account? answer: fewer than I’m moving, I suspect), I’ve noticed that I work with similar sets of categories. First there are the Books to be Discarded Without Much Regret, such as:
- Novels read in high school that I have absolutely no desire to read again (Hemingway? D.H. Lawrence? No thanks);
- Graduate course books, ditto;
- Books given to me as presents by people who didn’t know what I really wanted to read;
- Redundant books (even if I need one lexicon of Homeric Greek, I certainly don’t need two);
- Books acquired on a whim for very little money at rummage sales and never really referred to afterwards (whatever did I want with a book about terrariums?);
- Books I no longer need, e.g. Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day.
All of these are easy to add to the steadily growing Resell or Give Away pile. The books I’m keeping are also easy to identify: favorite authors, essential reference books (no way am I giving up my 2-volume compact OED), books I’m certain to reread, books I simply can’t imagine living without. The difficulty is with the in-between categories where an argument could be made either way:
- Scholarly books to which I might return if I do anything else with my dissertation;
- Books that stand as reminders of long-ago reading obsessions, and which I keep on hand as a way of staying in touch with the person I used to be when I was 18 and stagestruck, or 21 and a wannabe classicist;
- Books I really might reread (honest!);
- Books I never got around to reading in the first place, and now I feel guilty, because I did in fact want to read them;
- Out-of-print books that would be hard to find again;
- Art books that are oversized and heavy, but the illustrations are too beautiful to give up; and
- Books whose discarding would mean that I’d have to consider getting rid of a whole lot of others on the same grounds and that would just be too traumatic.
Ah well. Tomorrow I’m going to be getting estimates from a couple of movers, so I’ll soon know whether I can hang onto my collections of Norton Anthologies, psychoanalytic theory, and Greek and Latin literature in the original. But what I really need is my own remote storage facility!
* This is my clumsy translation from an Italian paperback edition that I just dug out of a partially packed box. I’m keeping it, even though I’ve been picking my way through it with a dictionary for ages and I’m still only on the fourth chapter. (Of course, then I found that you can read big swatches of If on a winter’s night here.)
Ah, not Hemingway!!! Re: D.H. Lawrence, only read part of Women in Love (still on the list) but I loved his novella, The Fox, so I can’t let him go yet, even though HD’s The Poet made me cringe a little with a shallow repulsion towards the shadow she apparently encountered (no rational reason to be influenced, though).
You know, I have a hardcover 2d edition Norton Anthology that B found somewhere (qualifies for out of print). But apart from that, the Nortons get updated so regularly and split into smaller volumes that I’ve repurchased the same volumes multiple times. What’s the point of keeping all that after a while?
I think your above post could be a quiz. What sort of book monger are you? Bookaholic? Book Baby? Book burner? Book banner? Ah, I’m out.
I feel very jealous of you being able to do this, as I’m completely unable to get rid of any of my books, even ones I don’t like. I’ll never read Thomas Hardy’s appalling poetry again, there is certainly no need for me to keep my father-in-law’s Harold Robbins collection, I loathe Jean Auel with a passion… and yet I can’t bear to part with any of them.
I loved Jean Auel. 🙂