How can I part with my precious books? No, really.

People who hoard books always have what seem to be good reasons for having books taking up all the available spaces in their places. Limiting book ownership to books you can put on shelves is actually a sane way to deal with this. This means that if you can not fit them on a shelf, you can't keep them which is a decent and objective way to look at a collection of anything. That said, it is totally fine to have many many shelves, it just should be clear that this is a choice you are making and not a compulsion that is framing the way you live your life. I have this problem to some extent and am also not perfect about it, but here are the rationales that I use. 1. I am not a hoarder and I should not look like one. Even if there is a "good" reason, piles of anything stacked on spaces that are supposed to be used for something else is a bad use of space and is clearly exhibiting a mixed sense of priorities. 2. The public library is a wonderful enduring institution that will have many-if-not-most classics and popular books for decades to come. I firmly believe this. 3. Realistically I refer to some of my books some of the time, others not at all and some of them I seem to not even know I have. It's fine to have a large "to read" stack/shelf of books, less okay to have 50-100 books in a state of partial read-ness if I don't realistically have time to read anything 4. To that end, using part of my day to actively read is a part of my deal with myself to be able to keep the books that I have. 5. I'm at least part Buddhist and my attachment to my books is a part, for me, of a desire that isn't really practical so I spend time thinking about that concept generally. An anxiety of what MIGHT happen that is causing a negative impact in what IS happening is problematic. Looking around my office now, I keep - books I have written or am in or that were written by friends of mine - professionally relevant books even if they are somewhat historical [i.e. books from library school a few decades ago] - old books that have some sort of personal meaning for me - books that were gifts - books that I LOVED and would re-read - books I like having around that are not in the way - old reference books which are my one area that I might be said to "collect" and books by two authors that I collect - books that are the right color for my sorted by color shelf (don't hate) Things I actively get rid of - popular paperbacks and hardcovers that I realistically do not think I will read again - reference books that have been superceded by the internet (dictionaries, language dictionaries, indexes to various things, old magazines, computer reference guides - multiples of books that I collect - books that are damaged - books that gradually "age out" of their relevance to me. I don't have a giant barn so I don't keep my old farm books. I am not doing linguistics so got rid of most [not all] of my linguistics books Things I do with old books - Give them to the library, be aware that the library MOSTLY puts these books in their book sales, not on the shelves - Give them to the thrift store so they can make some money selling these things or humanely recycling them - Put them up on Paperbackswap.com so I can trade them for books I might want - give them as gifts to friends What is a reasonable amount of books before you become a book-cat-lady There is no answer to this. I know a lot of people with books and here are my wild-ass assertions anyhow. If you are a person for whom books are something you are strongly using in your job or family/home life, this could be as high as several thousand. If you are someone who just likes to have them to look at and keep "just in case" I'd drop that number down to three figures. I live in a small apartment and I am brutal about only allowing books on shelves and while it's a fight I don't always win, I think it's worthwhile from a discipline standpoint to show that you own your books, they do not own you.

Who knows when you'll need a biography of Archibald Grimke! Or a guide to wildflowers of North America! Or to learn to speak Russian! All of these things are available in your local, not-personally-housed, library. In addition, when your children need, in 10+ years, a biography of Archibald Grimke, a guide to wildflowers of North America, or to learn to speak Russian, there will be a new biography from current historical resources, an updated edition of the wildflower field guide, and a more contemporary pedagogical approach to learning Russian. For the ones that you aren't thinking you'll ever read but you think would be expensive to replace, would it be more expensive to replace the handful of books this might ever happen with than paying storage on all them this whole time? This. I don't think that there is anything wrong with being a book-cat lady. I don't either. But if you're a cat lady with more cats than you can house and care for and are continuing to acquire cats, you are not a cat lady, you are an animal hoarder. I am not saying that's what is going on here; I am saying that just because books don't piss on the floor, there is an assumption that their accumulation never represents an issue. That is not the case. I have strong moral aversions to throwing away books unless they're truly abysmal. That's fine, but have you thought very concretely about what is going to happen when you are elderly and your home needs to be cleared for sale, or when you die and your executor is left dealing with 5,000 books? The end destination of these books would in those cases not be something you control and probably not what you would want. The immediate way to solve this problem is to be your own executor now, and reduce your collection on your own terms. It will be painful but it will be better than your worse case scenario. In your case, I think I would try a new approach: you have $300 to spend. Every book in your collection costs $1. What books would you buy again on this budget?

I went through this. Start with stuff that you can easily get rid of, because it can be easily replaced. Moby Dick, for instance, is available in every thrift store in American for twenty five cents. A lot fo my books were books I could replace with great ease and no cost if the need ever arose. Next, I went through and replaced books with digital versions. This was a bit pricier, but a tremendous space saver, and a lot of those books I can just keep up in the cloud and download to my reader whenever I needed. By this time, I had gotten a lot less precious about my books. The act of getting rid of a lot of them made the idea of getting rid of more of them much easier. So I went through and got rid of anything that I wasn't using, could be replaced (I checked on Amazon to make sure of availability), and didn't have any special meaning for me. That just left me with books I couldn't bear to part with or made extensive use of. And that was, maybe, five percent of my library. Because it happened piecemeal, it wasn't especially traumatic. And I do not find I often miss the books I got rid of. Those I do find myself missing, if that feeling keeps coming back, I go ahead and buy again, although I always see if there is a digital version first. For me, part of what I had to come to terms with was the fact that my library wasn't just a reference tool, it was a museum of my literacy. I always look at other people's bookshelves when I go to their houses, and feel I glean a lot about them from seeing what books they have. And so I wanted my bookshelf to represent me. But I came to a few conclusions that allowed me to not be so concerned about this. Firstly, we're just not in that world anymore. Now that books have gone digital, a bookshelf is no more a document of literacy than a CD collection is a document of musical literacy. Most of us now know that these physical spaces are limited representations of somebody's tastes, and the stuff they really care about and make use of probably now exists in much more flexible and accessible bits and bytes. Secondly, I realized that most of my books are so obscure that it's very likely that nobody would really glean that much out of seeing them. I had, I think, a pretend hipster in my head who would look at my collection and so, oh, Jack Black's You Can't Win, and Robert Stone's Hall of Mirrors, and Pamela Moore's Chocolate's for Breakfast, oh ho ho, what a fine collection! But there was only one real world hipster who would recognize those books as a collection and respond that way, and that was me. I already know what I have read. And finally, I have become very utilitarian about what I own. I must make use of it, or it's gone (with some exceptions, such as books signed by authors, or very rare books that would be hard to replace.) And I think it's because I no longer want to represent myself by what I own or consume, but by what I do. And this might be a very personal thing, but I think it's a reaction to 20 years of me obsessively defining myself by how I consume, and trying to establish standards of taste that identify my unique excellence. But there's no real challenge in consumption. There's no exceptionalism in how cleverly I spend money. All I do when I show off an excellent collection is show that I can recognize the excellent work that somebody else does. And there is value to this, but I have better ways of doing it than just by having books on a shelf. The web, in particular, has made it easy for me to share with people things that I think are great, and I think my desire has always been to share awesome stuff I have found (as it sounds like your desire is). Well, it is so easy to find that stuff now that I don't feel a need to hoard it, or have it physically present, but instead to tell people about it and point out how they can track it down for themselves. And this has made the bookshelf less important to me. It made getting rid of books a lot easier.

I went from a house with bookshelves in every room to a tiny little studio apartment - it was either the books or the cats, and honest-to-god, some days it was a tough decision. I had stuff from elementary school, I kid you not. Buying books and reading was my hobby for years and years, and both my sense of identity (I am a book person!), and nostalgia kept me hanging on to them. Know up front - it is HARD to let them go. You have to decide for yourself what is worth keeping, but these are some of the criteria I used, and how it worked out: Anything I re-read on a regular basis (e.g., once a year or so) - kept. I would change that now to anything I re-read on a regular basis that I can't easily get my hands on (out of print or whatever) through the library or a used book store. Reference books I actually use - kept. I got rid of too many of those, and wish I had gotten rid of other things instead. Reference books for hobbys I don't actually partake in (your wildflower book for example - if you don't regularly hike and/or have need to i.d. a plant, it's easier to look flowers up on the internet or get a book from the library when you need it). Any textbooks (unless still used as reference), children's books (I don't have kids), popular fiction, especially series - haven't missed them at all. Antique books - harder still to sort. Gifts, special meaning ones: kept. Sold any worth selling (fewer than you'd think), Gave away specialty ones to specialty museums (if they wanted them), gave as gifts any that met someone else's special interest. Which leads me to: give away as gifts as many as you can. Sell anything worth selling (reiterating - that's not many, and is a pain in the butt to do) through local used book stores that give cash or credit, and take the cash. Give away to: your local Friends of the Library used book store, specialty museums, nursing homes, anyone who would take them. Anything I was keeping for potential future use went in the get-rid-of pile: if I need it in the future, I will buy it at that time. With what's left: invite all your friends to come over and pick out what they want. *Anything* left over from all that I gave to the local thrift store. I did not throw away anything that wasn't in such bad shape it was essentially unreadable. I now have two (and only two) bookshelves - one in the living room area, and one next to my desk. My only regret, as I said, was not keeping some of the reference books I still occasionally reach for. Other than the initial trauma (and oh, it was) of letting all those books go, I find that I don't miss them nearly so much as I thought I would. Good luck.

I'm a librarian and a lot of my ideas about book ownership have been influenced by librarianship. For instance: I've come to value access over ownership. So, when I consider whether to get rid of a book, I consider two questions initially - #1 will I ever want to read/look in this book [again] and #2 how easy will it be to gain access to this book (or the necessary information I would want from the book)? You can check Amazon, WorldCat, and eBay to get an idea of how hard it would be to replace a book, though obviously some books will become more difficult to find over time. This helped me with a lot of books I felt like I *should* own. Like Wuthering Heights. I've read Wuthering Heights, I might one day want to look up a line from Wuthering Heights, but ultimately I don't really like Wuthering Heights and I don't need to have it on my shelf because it will always be in print and it will always be available electronically.* Secondly, I think about whether, even if I were to want the information in those books, if those books would be where I would turn for it. Like, if I decided I wanted to learn Russian, would this be the book I would choose to learn Russian from? Or would I take a class, and buy a nice new book with exercises and things? Would I read that Grimke biography or just look him up in Wikipedia (realistically - not in an ideal world)? Thirdly, and not to get too mystical about it, I think that when I keep books on my shelves unread, I am preventing them from achieving their purpose. I think about Ranganathan's first and third rules of library science: 1) Books are for use and 3) Every book its reader. If a book has been sitting in a box in my basement for any length of time, chances are I am not its reader. And it's not getting used. Fourth, it is OK to just straight up throw away books that are in bad condition (unusable - because books are for use).** Unless you take extraordinary measures, books are objects with a finite lifespan. Sure, you've got your Bay Pslam Books and your Dead Sea Scrolls, but those are freakish exceptions. You wouldn't feel bad about getting rid of your sofa if it was in terrible condition, and you don't need to feel bad about getting rid of books either. ("But books are different!" Well, they are and they aren't.) Fifth: storing books in a half-assed way (and unless a storage unit is climate controlled, it's extremely half-assed) shortens their lives. By a lot. So don't double-shelve books - it's bad for them (air can't circulate) and it's too hard to find the books you want (so they're effectively lost - think about when something gets mis-shelved in a library and no one can find it; even though it's still in the building, it's unusable). Philosophically, for me it all comes down to: books are for use. And practically it's about knowing that most books are replaceable. Like, while I was writing this I started thinking about one of the very few books I've regretted getting rid of, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195072391/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/. And you know what? I can buy a new copy for $11.72 plus $3.99 shipping. *OK, barring the fall of civilization, but seriously if civilization falls I will be even less interested in reading Wuthering Heights than I am now. **I actually believe that it is OK to straight-up throw away books that are in good physical condition but unlikely to be used: Reader's Digest Condensed Books, old encyclopedias, that vanity-published memoir of the CEO of your former workplace... But start with the ones in bad condition.

Would donating some of them to a prison library make you feel better about them finding a good home?

Update: Brought all the books to the house, and have been culling them into boxes along the following lines: 1) Hobby books that I plan to take up someday but have not done in years and are unlikely to have time for in the near to mid future. 2) Anything in bad condition goes (including torn covers or water damage), and if I really liked the book and still want to own it, it gets added to my Amazon Wishlist. Fiance has promised to buy me any of these books for Kindle anytime I really get the longing to read them. 3) Romance novels that aren't particularly well-written or antique 4) Science fiction or fantasy mass market paperbacks that have more than ten invented words on the back blurb and I cannot remember specifically liking. (Ie, "In the Grobnag times, Kessor Claire must learn to Thwackata the Kurbs in order to bring about the Shawana. But Cenkor Bob stands in her way. His desire for the Tahoota knows no bounds.." This suggestion actually came from my fiance, and has been astonishingly useful in reducing.) 5) Children's books that contain no substance or nice illustrations. I have also been using the sorting method mentioned above as well, in terms of thinking of shelves as homes: children's books go in the kid's room, reference, technical, history, mythology, classics, all go in the office, antiquarian books go in the fancy glass-enclosed bookcase in the living room, and radical politics, sex, fantasy, science fiction, and comics go upstairs in our bedroom. It has been very, very helpful. We now have eight boxes of books that we are getting rid of, and are inviting friends to go through them and take what they want at our housewarming party. After that, I'm still not sure what I'll do with them, but at least they're sorted and neatly in boxes.

I have 5,000+ books and have no intention of getting rid of any substantial number of them until I get old enough that I am facing the prospect of assisted living. The last time I got rid of a lot of books because of a move, I bitterly regretted it. This does not mean that I keep everything—in fact, I have made a deal with my wife that I will let one go for every one I acquire, and just to my left I've got a stack to be taken to http://www.yelp.com/biz/troubadour-books-hadley (if you're in the Northampton/Hadley/Amherst area, go to this wonderful bookstore, folks!)—but the vast majority of my books are ones that I either love, am planning to read, or consult every once in a while. And "every once in a while" may be once every decade, but when I want that particular book, I want it, dammit, and no, everything isn't on the internet, especially not the stuff I'm interested in. As for libraries, I love them but they can less and less be depended on to have what you want, if what you want is anything other than a current bestseller. In short, don't let yourself be bullied (even gently and with love) into giving up books you will regret not having. An uncluttered house is not the be-all and end-all. http://ask.metafilter.com/230722/How-can-I-part-with-my-precious-books-No-really#3339044 If I hang on to something without reading it for more than two culling cycles (and it's not a reference book) then off it goes. That's fine for those who can operate this way. I can't.

My policy is this: I go through books once a year. Knowing that I'm going to go through them every year makes it easier to get rid of things. If there's something I'm uncertain about, I feel comfortable hanging onto it, and then if I still don't want to keep it next year, off it goes. I either sell them to a local used bookstore, or I donate them to the library, which re-sells them in their used book store. These are some of the criteria I've used: 1) Is it easy to get? If yes, probably toss it. 2) Does it have family historical significance, like the 1922 collection of Keats in which my great-grandmother wrote a letter to her sister? If yes, keep. No one else will value it more. 3) Have I read it lately? If no, off it goes. 4) Does it have emotional significance? All those L'Engle books, I can get again, and I haven't read them in years. But those are the copies I read when I was 14 that made me feel valuable as a human, so I keep them. The major things that have helped me emotionally deal with culling books are these: 1) As whatzit wrote, considering the life of the book. Is it just sitting there, collecting dust? Do I really think my child will want to read it in the future? When was the last time I took it out and read it? It's good for books to be read. They get brittle and weird if they just sit on the shelves, and, yeah, they wear out faster being read, but that's what they're for. 2) Using the library regularly. I read a lot. I maintain an active holds list at the library (which I can do online) and have a weekly routine of returning books and picking up my holds. The routine helps keep my fines down, and my familiarity with the library has made me feel better about not owning all those books myself. Plus, my taxes are paying for someone else to maintain and weed the collection. I just get to read the books I want. If I read something I know I will want to have on hand later, I'll go buy a nice copy of it. My book budget gets used more thoughtfully this way. If I want a book I can't find in the library, even through interlibrary loan, I feel okay buying a secondhand copy and returning it out in the world when I'm done with it.