We are out of storage space in the house, so something has to go.
Before the library’s March 7, annual used book sale, I donated more than 600 books. It was pleasurable seeing them laying on tables in the main meeting room while people browsed through them. I hadn’t realized how many French language books I had until I saw them together in a box on a table. The donation process continues. I named it “The Great Book Sort” and made an entry on my daily planner with no ending date.
This is a form of curation unlike others I began. My process is developing, yet the main activities were to clear my five-foot-squared sorting table and place a box or two at a time on it. As I take them out of the box, some go directly into the stacks in my writing space, others into a box for donation. The rest are divided into piles to keep, maybe to keep, books that can easily be checked out from the library, and those relegated to the garage or to the bedside table. By the time I’m done, the 3,000 spaces in my writing room will reflect my reading life, and part of my intellectual history.
I did some advance work. First, I decided the only authors whose works I will keep in their entirety are Saul Bellow, Joan Didion, William Carlos Williams, and John Irving. They rest on the top shelf to my left, watching over my every activity.
I mentioned my nine shelves of poetry in another post. There is a presidential history section which needs curating. Same with art books, regional history, reference books, farming-related books, and American Studies topics (native, black, women, and pioneer culture).
I began culling cookbooks. The two remaining shelves are ones I expect to use and the rest are either gone or in several boxes in the stacks to be reviewed once more, then likely donated. We have a project list that includes a new cabinet in the dining room for cookbooks. We are a distance from actually getting that. The recipes I keep in the kitchen are handwritten in spiral bound books and a collection of papers clipped together. Mostly this system works.
Part of this curation will be to refine the categories of what is on the shelves. Right now there are too many categories.
A home library is personal. My story in books is evolving from random collections into something more usable in daily life. I will never read everything again, yet the comfort of good books, carefully curated and surrounding me is a net positive. The Great Book Sort is a project worth doing.
Journey Home 
2 replies on “Books, Too Many Books”
Sharon and I attended the solon book sale, I found a few to take home for my “collection” but running out of shelves continues! I have my eye on a space for one more book shelf which will make 10 book cases in my house. Culling books is difficult with a full set of crazy notions of what it is that I “like” and “need” but I have done some that even now I regret at times! I gave away my collection of Mother Earth News, the early stuff, where they included blue prints in the magazine and printed no color adds, something they finally did when it changed hands. No longer the “hippie-dippie” we can do this with next to nothing sort of magazine, and then became something for the wealthier “we can afford this or that” thing we can buy, be it trucks, equipment, generators etc.. I still have my Whole Earth Catalogues though. Civil War stuff I collect simply because there is a whole lot of interest and if it is cheap, why not? I wouldn’t part with my Iowa Civil War material, but have unloaded some on a book dealer in McGregor, Iowa. I had a nice collection of material on housing that I donated to “Save CR” for a library on housing, based on the prices of the books when new, well over $300 in next to new books that they were happy to accept! After ten years in archaeology the stuff I have that concerns this subject isn’t moving! Nor is my collection of agriculture stuff that includes political material on the Socialist movement in the midwest and all the protests and dealings with “middle men” who screwed the farmers through monopoly in the 1870’s and even earlier in the east by their control of the markets. I have lots of authors from the 1960’s and later who like Abbie Hoffman and others tried to change the direction in which we were going! People like Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie, Saul Alinsky, Eldridge Clever, Michael Harrington, Edward Abbey, Wendel Berry, and others. The people who who tried Marxism and other forms of Social government, organizing for a better world, and giving capitalism/democracy a run for its money! Then there is my book case with three shelves of material on and about abolition and the movements that created the Under Ground Railroad, can’t part with that! I have 25 years of research on that sort of thing in the midwest and have found four conductors! I’m a little active with the “Iowa Barn Foundation” and found a picture book they put together art the Solon Library Sale, I didn’t have, so now it too is in my collection! It is all good, and if I have to part with any of it, the right time and the right situation will come around and I will take that opportunity to surprise someone and give them something they will never forget! Steve Hanken
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Hi Paul
Funny, we decided to keep the collected works of Bellow and Irving as well. We donated last year about one thousand esoteric books and several hundred cookery books. But unfortunately, this space is already taken.
Happy reading
The Fab Four of Cley
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
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