The last of those statements is the one I agree with wholeheartedly. I keep a lot of my books, but the ones that I don’t keep, I do try to get out into the flow of things for someone else to have. Because there* is *someone out there who would like to read that book, and maybe hasn’t found it yet or couldn’t afford to buy it.
To me it’s, well, yeah – one doesn’t just toss books, because they’re books, which I suppose I’ve got a certain mystical (or irrational, if someone wanted to be rude about it) respect for. The written and printed word --these lines and curves drawn on a flat surface become words - sounds! images! stories! when we look on them! – is some serious mojo if you ask me, the first and best big, magical thing humans ever got accomplished. Books are that mojo in a form one can see and touch and hold in one’s hands and throw across the room, so it behooves us to treat them a bit more carefully than dustpans, say, or paint rollers. Besides which, there* is *always that person who hasn’t had access to that book yet, and it’s no good wasting useful things if you can avoid it.
So you take them to a thrift store…or a homeless shelter…or an old folks’ home. The Greyhound station, maybe --there’s nothing like a good read to make a long, draggy-ass bus ride a little less tedious, you know?.
Hell, I’m not above filling a box with raggedy paperbacks or similar no-resale-value literature, writing FREE BOOKS!!! on the box with a felt-tip, and leaving the whole shebang in a laundrymat or on top of a newspaper box. People do that fairly often in the Bay Area, and you’d best believe if I see a pile of cast-off books for the taking I will stop and look them over, and I’m far from the only one who’ll do so. This guerilla give-away is much preferable to throwing books away, like they were empty soup cans or dead lightbulbs or busted-up athletic shoes or something.
Of course not – there’s no such thing as a mortal sin. But you would be letting something nice go to waste, when there are better ways to solve your problem.
Again: There are lots and lots of people around who would be real glad to have some free or Goodwill-priced books made available to them, and you’ve got a shitload of books you have no space for – see how nicely those circumstances balance each other out? You can unclutter your space and give some folks a lot of pleasure at the same time!
PS: Personally, I wouldn’t throw that box of cereal away, either, unless there was actually something wrong with it. There’s always somebody around swho’s hungry.