I am sure some of you are reading this right now ready to get to the comments to proclaim “THERE CAN BE NO SUCH THING AS TOO MANY BOOKS”. For many years, I did and in principle still do agree. However... until such time as I lay hands on Hermione Granger's handbag with Undetectable Extension Charm, a TARDIS, or a pocket/alt universe, or any similar such means of making more space than Casa Brillig currently owns, I cannot have more books. In fact, as we begin to look at the inevitable downsizing that will occur when the kids are living their best lives in their OWN houses, it’s time to take a serious look at giving books we will not read again a potential new home. Grab a beverage and please make sure it’s in a covered container, since we do NOT want liquid spilling on the books, and hop below the story break because I really could use some advice on how to proceed with what feels like an overwhelming task.
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One of the things that Mr. Brillig and I first discovered we had in common was a voracious appetite for books. Long before Kindle and other E-Readers existed, we made regular trips to bookstores (remember them? Places with so many books, and you could wander the aisles and find treasures?) and each year our collection grew a bit. In our house we put bookshelves along one wall in the room we named the Library, and filled it. When K1 arrived, we bought all the books and it turned out she was a voracious reader, too! Even K2, much as he loves his soccer, to this day has a set of books in his room that he loves. As the kids grew older, the books they aged out of were packed in boxes and went to the attic. The bookshelves grew overloaded with books, and we packed some of OUR books away — notice I didn’t say organized and packed. This will be important.
We come to today, where there are at a rough count 15-20+ banker-sized boxes full of books in various places in the house, plus another 800 or so books on shelves. NOT organized, and we’ve never done an inventory on them. Some of them are inscribed, or are treasured favorites of ours, or are books our children want to keep to pass on the love of reading to their future children.
I am overwhelmed.
It made sense (to me) that the first thing to do is go through the shelves and boxes and decide what stays, and what goes. That’s what I spent today doing, and it was surprisingly easy to find many that do not need to stay in our house. Those will go into boxes to be (hopefully) donated to somewhere and either find good homes, or be knowledgeably deemed ready to be recycled. Suggestions on where to donate? The genres we read most (F&SF) are not ones asked for by prison reading programs.
Where I’m running into trouble is that I’d like a way to catalogue what we’re keeping. There’s long-delayed work on the room itself that needs to happen, so everything must be boxed and stored elsewhere until that’s done. I haven’t found a method to do this, although scanning covers on Goodreads and creating some organization there might work. Thoughts?
Have any of you done such large downsizing of books that weren’t in nicely sorted-by-author rows and have advice to share? I’m all ears!!
Thank you to BeninSC for volunteering to organize our Tops tonight! You have NO idea how long it took him to format them all!!
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From ericlewis0:
We receive this comment gold nomination of a Tara the Antisocial Social Worker brilliance!
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This 2 sentence comment by BlackSheep1 is a perfect summation of trump!
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