01.01.08

Getting rid of books

Posted in Reading at 8:13 am by Henry

You know that fellow surrounded by books? The one who dwells inside a multi-room, wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling library? The one who oozes tweedy schmaltz about being unable to say goodbye to his best friends?

That’s not me, not lately anyway. Since coming back from Lake Superior last fall, I’ve been steadily banishing a lifetime’s collection of books from the premises. Sooner or later, whenever the housing market recovers, the Lady Friend and I will be moving into a condo, or maybe a retirement community, and we will have to dump most of the the packrattery we’ve amassed.

The books are easiest to let go of, but there are so many of them. Everyone will have his own standards for triage, but mine are simple:

1. The mysteries and thrillers will go to the cabin on Lake Superior, where most of the whodunit collection has lived for the last few years anyway. They are reference tools for the working whodunit writer and some of them are worth rereading just for pleasure.

2. The personally inscribed copies from fellow writers will stay, out of a perhaps misguided sense of loyalty. Wouldn’t want a colleague to come upon one of his books in a used bookstore and feel that I hold our friendship jettisonable. After I’ve passed on to the great library in the sky, neither of us will care.

3. The mound of paperbacks containing cover quotes from my reviews stays, too. It’s a simple matter of ego: Once somebody, perhaps only a marketing specialist, valued my literary opinion enough to enshrine it on the back of a softcover. Those are trophies of a kind.

4. Also remaining is the pile of first editions of novels by Updike, Bellow, Cheever, Roth and Malamud. Someday they might be worth good money on the collector’s market, and my heirs could use the proceedings to help send their children to college.

5. The thirty feet of Library of America books will remain, too. Not only do they look good on the wall, I plan to read them all from A to Z, beginning with Adams, Henry, when I eventually wind up in a nursing home.

All these make up only about five per cent of the books in my house. All the rest slowly are being boxed and trundled down to the Evanston Public Library, which cherry-picks what it wants for the shelves and puts the rest in book sales, the proceeds from which go to new acquisitions.

I have felt no sentimentality about this process. A book, to me, is not a holy artifact, an icon, to be blindly worshipped. It’s what’s inside the book, its intellectual content, that’s important. A book is only a container for ideas. Once read, it’s just a husk. Passing it on to a new reader magically resurrects its soul.

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