Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire

  • Mood:
  • Music:

Confessions of an incurable bibliophile.

I love books.

I love the feeling of them, the weight of them, the smell that you only get when you have a sufficient density of books in a room. I love the reality of them. I'm never going to be one of those people who makes the transition to electronic books, because they just aren't real enough for me. I say this as someone who writes books on a computer, and rarely, if ever prints them out before they hit the final draft; I realize it's not a rational way to be. It's just how I'm wired. It doesn't help that I'm an obsessive packrat who collects basically everything you can think of. When Pokemon was big, the core philosophy -- 'gotta catch 'em all' -- made total sense to me. I just chose to apply it to books.

All my life I've wandered through used bookstores, looking at the shelves and wondering how anyone could ever, ever let some of those volumes out of their hands. I've seriously theorized that certain books must have come from estate sales following the tragic deaths of their owners, because otherwise, how could they have wound up on that shelf? There's just no way the parting was voluntary. The knowledge that someday, my books will be on those shelves, books with my name on them, cast into the chilling world of the second-hand tome, just doesn't compute. Once you own a book, it's yours forever, right?

Right?

Recently, the rapidly shrinking floor space in my home has forced me to take a long, hard look at this philosophy, and admit that, perhaps, there are things in life more important than owning every book ever published by Leisure Horror. Like, y'know, being able to find my way to the bathroom. And not being one of those 'human interest' stories about the woman found a week after the big earthquake, smothered under the weight of her own toppled anthology collection. Also, I'm trying to raise money to go to WorldCon in Australia in 2010, and selling some of the books I have no intention of ever reading again seems like a good way to start. And I have books I'm never going to read again. I try to pretend that I don't, but I do. There are books I only get the urge to read every six or seven years, and that's one thing. There are reference books, and that's another thing. But works of fiction whose contents have long since ceased to appeal to me in any meaningful way? Yeah, those can go.

Getting rid of books is at once entirely alien to me and deeply cathartic. This book I didn't like? I'm not obligated to keep it. This book I liked just fine but haven't read since 1992, and wow, the idea of reading it now ceases to appeal after three pages? It can go. This book here that was the literary equivalent of a bad Science-Fiction Channel Original Movie? It was fun once, I'm not buying the DVD, the novelization can go. Suddenly, it's possible that I might be able to put the books I actually want back on the shelves. Suddenly, I can see the floor.

It's all very strange.

But kinda cool.
Tags: cleaning my house, contemplation, reading things
  • Post a new comment

    Error

    Anonymous comments are disabled in this journal

    default userpic

    Your reply will be screened

    Your IP address will be recorded 

  • 20 comments
It was even stranger to realize that I could throw out comic books. Not the good ones, of course. And not the handful that I owned that had any value as collectibles (and almost nothing I have ever owned counted as such even before the Age of the Trade Paperback and Scans Daily). But the mediocrities that didn't sell then and won't sell now and that just aren't something I plan to ever re-read. It was weird the first time I did it, and now it just makes sense.

Not that I still throw very much out, mind you. They're still Comic Books, after all.
I have come to that same realization myself. A lot of my longboxes are gonna go, but I have to weed through for the full runs of short series I loved [that they're not likely to reprint] before I do.
I finally had to start doing that, and once you get started, it's not so hard after all. The used book shop doesn't pay a lot for them, but since I'd be in there buying more books anyway, it does at least cut my final bill a bit (says the woman that just spent $100 at the used book store, lol)
Ah, another bibliophile who hates to part with books. My MIL thinks we're nuts because we never get rid of books. She reads a lot but recycles books (via her sister and the used book store).

I've actually gotten rid of several boxes of books in the past year. I sent a big box to a friend of mine who's stuck in a rehab facility. He was apparently VERY popular with the ladies due to all the romances I included in the box. If you have such a place nearby, you might see if they'd like some of your cast-offs.
I am another confirmed bibliophile and after filling 15 bookshelves 2 deep with another two 4 by 4 shelves stacked with books 3 feet high, I realized I needed to do something.

We recycled some of them such as old computer books so outdated no one would want them ever again. We gave some away. But the best thing I found was a bookstore that sells new and used books and gives you store credit to buy new books for your old books. Oh, what a delight for a booklover like moi. At a ratio of 2.5/1 I am slowly culling the bookshelves whilst still feeding my habit.
*smiles*
Just the word earns you this. ;)
That is wonderful!

Yes, I definitely would like several of these. I could line them up side by side and pile more bookshelves on top and we could have aisles in our library in addition to the wall to wall books.

Now I just need to find a way to come up with another $14,000.

*giggles*
...some of the books are accidental re-purchases, perhaps? We have a few of those.

Which, er, I never have managed to give to the library or sell to a used bookstore. *facepalm*
Yes, I have several which were accidental repurchases (and some which were intentional because I couldn't find the originals). And then there are some others of which I deliberately have multiple copies (Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land", the originaly published edition not the 'uncut' version, because all the new ones I see in the shops are the 'uncut' and honestly I think the editing wasa great improvement); Silverlock, of which I have at least two 'lending' copies as well as my 'reading' copy.

But almost all of my books are there because I want to reread them. Not necessarily now, or even in a predictable time, but I know that sometime I will want to read "that book" and it will be OOP (and these days public libraries seem to not stock many OOP books, they don't have the storage space).
Yeah, realizing something is not only OOP, but probably DFONCBMPL (that's my on-the-spot acronym coinage for "deaccessioned from or never collected by my public library") is painful and real.

And you can't always count on once-popular authors [or even some still-popular authors backlist - frex, ever realize you were missing only one early Mercedes Lackey Valdamar 2nd-part-of-a-trilogy book and the library doesn't have it?! 'tis a truly maddening case of plotus interruptus] being on their shelves, either. Me, I collect John Dickson Carr, aka Carter Dickson, who was known as the master of the locked room mystery and often wrote 3-4 books a year during his heyday (1930s-1970s). A lot of his books were never issued in hardback and I still have several gaps that I fear may only be fillable by paperbacks so brittle I'd be afraid to read them. :(
Yes, I have several which were accidental repurchases (and some which were intentional because I couldn't find the originals). And then there are some others of which I deliberately have multiple copies (Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land", the originaly published edition not the 'uncut' version, because all the new ones I see in the shops are the 'uncut' and honestly I think the editing wasa great improvement); Silverlock, of which I have at least two 'lending' copies as well as my 'reading' copy.

But almost all of my books are there because I want to reread them. Not necessarily now, or even in a predictable time, but I know that sometime I will want to read "that book" and it will be OOP (and these days public libraries seem to not stock many OOP books, they don't have the storage space).
Empathizing so very much with this post right now. I spent a big chunk of this past weekend removing books from my bookshelves, and adding them to the *bags and bags* of books in one part of our garage that need to be taken to the used bookstore.

The first day that I worked on this, Runnerwolf wandered into my room to check on me, and I asked her what she thought. I broke down into giggles at the expression on her face. I'd describe it as, "Gee, that's really great, and I *know* you've been putting a lot of work into this, but I honestly don't see any difference, and I have no idea how to tell you that..."

This was, of course, followed by me unpacking boxes of my books that had been sitting in our garage for *mumble*-years. That was a lot of fun, in the "Oh, hey, I did own a copy of that!" sense. I did get rid of a lot of duplicates, and sort out the ones I didn't want to keep, and then moving on to the next box.
Which brings up the question: How many copies of IT did you keep?

I really know the feeling though. My father used to joke that for me reading wasn't enough, I would devour them, then restore them, and hoard them as though I was Smaug sitting on his pile of treasure.
Halimede and I have long ago learned to not count books. Instead we count Cubic meters of them.
As the concrete floor of our apartment is starting to buckle, we decided to get rid of some books ourselves.
A week ago, the ABC here in Amsterdam had a 'book return day'. They were rather surprised to see us bring in about 200. I think we helped in making it a really good day for them :)
The weird thing is that 200 books (big ones too!) just doesn't make a dent. I can't even see holes on the shelves. O.o
I know exactly how you feel about not making a dent when you get rid of books.

When I moved my office from one which accommodated 5 bookshelves to one which only takes a single lone solitary one, I decided to cull my books. As fate would have it, there was a non-profit down the road that was having a book sale near that time period. I gave them about 400 books and thought it would make oh such a difference at home. Could I tell? Not in the least. In fact our library became more crowded because I had to bring those bookshelves home. LOL.
pghkitten and I came to this realization earlier this year, coincidentally a few months before we found and bought a house, and eliminating a lot of "never gonna read-again's" helped a lot. We're still about one large bookshelf short of space for our entire library, but that's at least one bookshelf better than we were at the beginning of this year, and now we're looking critically at the manga and saying "Psychic Academy had some nice fanservice, but really, am I gonna read all 11 volumes again? No." It's not an easy realization to come to, as a fellow book-hoarder, but it helps when you do, and it makes more room for the good stuff to add later. Our writing styles change as we grow, and so do our reading styles; just as I won't mourn the unpublishability of my third-grade short stories, I've decided not to shed a tear over the novels that I realize I just don't enjoy like I used to.
Yeah... Nothing quite beats the joy of walking into a bookstore... :D
I work for a publishing company.

One of the perks.

Free books shelves on every floor.

3 times a year we can order 5 free books.

My department allows me to order 2 free books every month.

I'm happy.

I also get to share my good fortune w/ others. That's even better.
If I might make an off-topic comment, great music choice!
Hee. Yeah, I have a hard time parting with books, but will do so for ones I really will never read again. Unfortunately, there aren't many books I own that fit that category. I do wind up with some duplicates, and will sell them to the used bookstore. Some are unintentional, some are improvements over the copy I already had (upgrading to hardback, for instance). But yeah, they don't often leave my collection. Good for you for weeding out yours!
I have a hard time parting with books too. I recently got a friend to put up 5 metres of shelving in my room for me; the shelves are practically full, as are the bookcases below them, but I still have towers of books on my desk (can't sit at that desk because there's no space on top) as well as three crates of books (plus towers on top) in front of the shelves and boxes of books under the bed and in the wardrobe.
There's also about 2k other books divided between my mum's loft and my friend's parent's loft.

I do try to get rid of them, it's just that I have so many, so it takes a few years to notice any difference.