The Third Great Book Purge

My parents never threw away a single book.

That’s the kind of statement that might get a casual reader’s head nodding in sympathy. How wise. How true! But when you consider that I had one career academic for a father, and a mother who couldn’t pass a bookstore (new or used) without emerging with an armful of volumes bought on whim, it might lend some understand to the pathological truth that my life was less the stately library of Downton Abbey and a little more along the lines of a particularly grim bibliophile Hoarders.


Some of my earliest memories of my father are of him in his office at the university, where the bookshelves lined every wall and soared to the ceilings—and considering his office was in one of those stately old townhouses with ceilings so high one needed a ladder to reach the uppermost shelves, that’s a lot of books. My mother stored her books in anything that could be pressed into purpose. Not only bookshelves, but dressers, closets, coffee tables, cabinets, kitchen shelves, the piano bench, the pantry. Her paperbacks were double and triple-stacked on each shelf. She even kept the old crossword puzzle books she’d buy at the drugstore, once they’d been filled and completed.

Basically I grew up with the assumption that books were meant to be kept, and for decades I did so. I kept all the childhood books I either bought or received as gifts. I had every college textbook I ever bought, ever obscure graduate school treatise. I had every book I’d picked up for dimes at library used book sales, every book I’d spent my own money on once I had income.

It got, quite frankly, ridiculous. The first time we moved house, the movers complained about the number of books. They were afraid to stack them all on the same side of the house because it might cause the floors to cave in. And when movers are telling you that you have too many books, and they’re looking at your refrigerator and heavy appliances with the light of relief in their eyes, it’s probably time to do something.

So about a decade ago I went on the Great Book Purge. I went through my entire collection, volume by volume, and asked myself the questions, Have I read this since I bought it? Am I likely to read it again? If the answer to either question was no, out it went. I got rid of most of my college and grad school books that way, the volumes of Victorian poetry, anything having to do with Chaucer (sorry, Chaucer), the useless cookbooks. By the time I was done, I’d gotten rid of roughly fifty percent of my collection. I thought I was down to a manageable size.

Until Craig got his new job and we had to move, that is. I was forced to pack all my books in 2010 when we put our house up for sale, because the real estate agent was frank about the fact that no one wanted to look at my damned library when they trooped through our old house. I’d managed not to accumulate quite so many volumes since the Great Book Purge, but I’d picked up a bookcase and a half worth of my own novels—author copies—and I wasn’t throwing out those.

I did get rid of a lot in the Second Great Book Purge, though. I concentrated particularly on public domain novels that I could easily get electronically if I had to. My Dickens collection, for example, or all the Brontes, the editions of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney that I could download to my iPad any old time. I prefer to read ebooks, most of the time these days; it made no sense to cart those heavy tomes thirteen hundred miles across the country.

Since 2010 I haven’t really seen my books. They went from the bookshelves to the garage of my old house for a year, and then from Detroit to Connecticut, where they’re still in storage until we move into somewhere more permanent. But there are still way too many of them. My interest in ebooks was still pretty high. I had almost 700 books on my iPad—a good many of which were volumes I actually owned that had been written by, you know, people who are still alive, or recently were so.

The thought came to me. Why am I holding onto hardbacks that collectively weigh a ton when I can stuff as many of them as I like into a device that weighs a little over a pound?

So the Third Great Book Purge began.

Last month a local library held a used book sale and was looking for donations. I went through the boxes in storage and gave them quite a boost to their bottom line with a massive donation. Science fiction hardbacks, murder mystery hardbacks—anything that I’d managed to purchase in electronic form—gone from my bookshelves (or my library-in-storage, anyway). More than that, I culled a bunch of volumes I re-read on a regular basis—my Patrick Dennis novels, my Betty MacDonalds—and have set them side to scan and turn into ebooks for my personal use, so I can jettison those, too.

I have to confess: it’s been such a freeing experience. It’s scary to see all those volumes, the decades of collecting, the sometimes long process of searching for a rare find, trundled out the door. But in the last couple of years, out of necessity I’ve learned how to make do without my books surrounding me en masse. Decisions like this get easier and easier.

I know the typical arguments about ebooks. I like the feel of a real book. I like the sensation of turning the pages! Whatever, Luddites.

I like real books too. I grew up around them. I find their presence comforting. When I die, I’m still going to have too many books for the tastes of my executors.

But if there’s anything I can do to reduce that number before it happens, I’ll do it.