Ruminations on Books ... and Boxes

I love books. I love seeing them on the shelf, holding them in my hands, reading them, finishing them, reading them again to encounter them in a new way.... there's basically nothing about books that I don't love. Years ago, I ordered something from the Gaylord library supply company and received their catalog with my order. As I perused the catalog, wanting to buy at least one of everything in it, I realized that I didn't really want a house. I wanted a library!

Nevertheless, our current house doesn't offer much in the way of wall space against which to place bookshelves, nor open space in which we can put freestanding bookshelves. Therefore, many of our books have been in boxes ever since we moved to Dodge. They move in and out of the boxes, depending on what books we want to access in any given day or week, but they have still been in boxes.

The boxes have also migrated -- from a bedroom to the office to another bedroom to the dining room to the family room, upstairs, downstairs, in my lady's chamber.... and eventually to the storage locker, which was close enough that we could still shuffle books in and out of boxes at our whim. But now the boxes are back in the house where the books belong.

I happened to mention to a group of online friends that we had moved these 200 or so boxes back into the house and that I was going through them, and I said that I would be "tossing, freecycling, filing, shelving, or putting away the contents. I know there are a number of books from our homeschooling days that I can pass along to families with younger children. Or I might see what we can get over at the used book store for some of the books we won't use and my friends don't want. I'll be glad to have my fiction and reference books readily available again, however."

This remark caused a storm of comment, mostly from people who thought I should just rid of all the books (donating them to the library, who would probably just sell them), that I shouldn't bother putting up bookcases because when we sell this house some people might be turned off by the sight of all those books, that if I had already read a book that there was no point in keeping it, that books weren't worth the cost of moving them, and so on. 

One person said there's no point in owning books because you can just get them at the library! I don't know what library that person goes to, but I do know that the vast majority of the books we own are not in the library collection here in Dodge. Not in a lot of other places, either.


Don't get me wrong. I love libraries. Even here in Dodge, which has a somewhat unsatisfactory library collection, I am at the library at least once a week. I usually have between 5 and 15 books checked out of the library at any given time. Libraries are great. For some things. My experience has been that libraries are relatively good at having recent fiction (published within the last 20 years) and "classic" fiction. They are less likely to have in circulation fiction that is more than 15-20 years old, even if the author is still actively writing and publishing books. Libraries also have to make room for new books.


In terms of non-fiction.... well, we have a couple of special collections that our local library cannot rival. And we use a lot of our non-fiction for reference on a regular basis. 


So I asked this group if anyone else re-read fiction or kept books for reference. There was mostly silence. Well, one person collects cookbooks -- but they are weeded out on a regular basis because there is only so much room on the bookshelf.


Finally one person said this, which sums up my attitude very nicely: "...we have thousands of books [because] they form parts of our lives and interests and yes, we reread, we savour, we review."

With all that as prelude, I can now tell you that I have started going through the boxes that were in the front hall. Friday's magic number:

33! Since we started with 37, that means 4 boxes sorted through. One contained math textbooks from our homeschooling days, so I set that aside to see if any homeschoolers I know are interested. One was full of youth group stuff (thought I had already gotten rid of all that) that ended up mostly in the recycle bag. One box had canceled checks and check registers from our bank account back in the town we lived in 6 years ago  before moving to Dodge. Definitely in the shred pile. There was also a large storage box full of photographs, which the offspring and I spent time going through in great detail.


My find in the photo box was proof that boxes of books are not new in my life. These pictures were taken in my second apartment -- about a year after I left college and got a real job:

The cats were my very first pair of cats -- Francesca (the calico) and Ragtime (the black and white Sleeping Beauty). From the empty bookcase in the background, I surmise that I was just moving in so I had some excuse for boxes of books. However, I also note that some of the boxes are standing on their sides with book spines facing out. My guess is that those were "supplementary" book cases.


I probably still have most of those books, but I miss Ragtime and Francesca. They were great cats.


So of the first four boxes, one was definitely keeper books, mostly paperback science fiction by some of my favorite writers. One was homeschooling books that will be passed along. A third box's contents was mostly papers that have been recycled. And the fourth had stuff to shred and old family photographs, which are now located with others of their kind.


My offspring grabbed a few photos that they wanted for their personal collections. I scanned them in before relinquishing them. Here's one:

That is my daughter the Drama Queen and one of her friends in a ride at Old Orchard Beach in Maine. I couldn't find the picture from this trip that I really wanted -- of an 18-month-old Sports Nut trying to climb out of the ferris wheel while we were at the top of the ride.


In other news from before the weekend -- the Wizard finally was home long enough to put in the new fireplace screen. The old fireplace screen has been missing a panel since before we bought this house. We kind of lived with it -- and blocked the fireplace opening in the winter with piles of boxes, which were never in short supply. The new screen looks really nice:

Unfortunately, it's just a tad smaller than the old screen. I'm going to take some rags and water and clean up all that soot any day now.


And finally, a knitting update. I finally was able to cast on for the Wallaby sweater for the older sister. I then had to rip it all out and start again because I got the stitches twisted, but at least I started. As of Friday:

And that's it from before the weekend. The offspring have a cousin visiting from Boston and the Wizard is on his way out of town again, so this promises to be a busy week. But I will continue to post updates on box progress.