My collection of out of date computer books has served me well in the past. There’s always some legacy system or another lying around, waiting to fail. Being able to look something up that I read 10 years ago has fixed some ugly problems.
We get rid of books that we can’t figure out why we’re keeping. That’s the entirety of our formula. At least ten percent of the reason we’re looking for a house is for more book space. 
Not so if you find yourself moving a lot. The cost of my move from Cleveland to Austin was approximately 60 cents a pound. With a moving budget of $3,000, getting rid of 100 books that I read only infrequently, which aren’t related to work or othher areas of personal interest, saved me $60 on the move. Yeah, it cost me a lot more than $60 to buy them in the first place, but still, every move offers the opportunity to further declutter and simplify my life.
If my friends attracted dust and silverfish, and started stacking up around my house like cordwood, I might well discard them.
I know that book worship is a popular theme around here, and I would have agreed with you at one point. It can get pathological after a while, however, and frankly a huge proportion of books are not worth much more than the paper they’re written on. Most others will never go out of print or become hard to access in your lifetime, especially with things like Project Gutenberg out there.
I have started tossing any book that I would give less than a C grad to. If, during a review, I say C- or anything less, it goes. Other books I try to give away, if I can. But I’m starting to get to a point where I will have to do something with a bunch of them soon.
I’ve had a steadily declining volume of books for a number of years now. I used to collect series and they looked kind of cool on the shelf, but when I realized I hadn’t read them in years and wasn’t really interested in re-reading them, I got rid of them. Every year or so, I’ll have another cull and bring a few boxes to the second-hand bookstore for store credit. I’ll then buy a few ‘new’ books with most of the credit.
Using this method and attending a couple big annual used book sales in the area to replinish lost stock, I’ve managed to steadily decrease the number of books I have. I’ve had kids for four years now and have needed the space.
My general rule is if I haven’t read it in five years or didn’t REALLY like it when I last read it, it goes. That said, I probably only read about 20-30 books a year.
Well, yeah. Even I won’t keep a book if I didn’t like it. That’s just silly.
I also use the library for the vast majority of my reading. The thing is, I read 20-30 books a month. No way I could afford to buy or store that many books, but I do have several thousand books, some dating back to my childhood, and a few that date back to my father’s childhood.
I wanted to mention: my most recent (ex-)girlfriend once quoted this rule at me, and I told her I thought it was insane. I walked over to one bookshelf and started naming books that were OOP and had been for more than 20 years. Then I told her how many times I had read each one, and when I had last read it. Eventually she agreed that maybe that rule wouldn’t really work for me (but Og! how she hated the clutter :rolleyes:). Her idea of reading was maybe 1-2 popular paperbacks per year. She thought Dan Brown was the epitome of modern fiction, for instance. So for her, that rule worked fine.
My first thought was that you must be much younger than me, but I see from your profile that we’re about the same age. Come on, ten years ago seems like last week!
Welll, I have The Guns of August on my shelf, and I’m sure I didn’t pick it up for at least five years. But then I traveld to Belgium and Luxembourg, and I wanted to re-read what Barbara Tuchman had said about the experience of those countries in World War I. I didn’t just want facts, I wanted to remember what she had written. So I picked it up.
Then there’s that book about the 1924 election (not online). I can easily go a year without thinking about the 1924 election. But I’ve thought about it intermittently in the past, and will probably do so again, maybe during the next election. So it would be foolish to throw the book out.
Then there’s Embracing Defeat, about Japan after World War II. I don’t often think about Japan. But not long ago, it supplied the perfect quote when someone asked on this Board about translation problems during the war crimes trials. And if I travel to Japan, which I will someday, I may want to read the whole thing again.
But after ten years? It’s probably a safe bet that I won’t think about that subject again, or if I do I’ll turn elsewhere.
We end up moving every few years. Each time I swear I will get rid of all of them.
I now (for the last 5 years or so) have as many bookshelves as I’m comfortable having filled. 3 tall bookcases are the “premanent collection”. If something crosses my threshold that I wish to keep I must find something I want to keep less.
Having an excellent public library branch, with nice long hours conveniently situated between my home and work helps. I got rid of a number of books I love enough to read over and over again once I determined they were available at the library.
I have a separate smaller bookcase in my room which is home to library books, borrowed books, and any that I want to read before I donate them. My mother’s approach to keeping book clutter down is to hand me a shopping bag full of books each time I visit her. The ones that don’t get doanted immediately go to the “just passing through” shelves.
I don’t consider books placed neatly on shelves to be clutter. When there are books balanced horizontally on top of vertical ones, or a teetering stack by my side of the bed that’s clutter.
Throwing out books? Only if they are mildewed or have insect or other damage.
I do sell between twenty and thirty books a week on Amazon, and the ones not worth reselling are donated. I do not have any problem with removing a book from my inventory for a read, and I have one bookcase of personal favourites.
My rule tends to be ‘will I read it again?’
If the answer is yes, then I keep. If not, they go. It keeps me fairly in check as I tend to go to the library often. If I find myself constantly taking a book out from the library I go find myself a copy (usually from the second hand book store). This happens less often than you think, and though my library is quite good if I’m really into an author I do buy the paperbacks. They spread them throughout the city and I don’t have the time to be chasing a book around the city if the branches nearest me don’t have it. These tend to fall into ‘read it again once or twice then off to the second hand store for you’.
If I don’t like it anymore, it’s become too damaged, or it turns out I have two copies. I’ve read books that I’ve let sit unread for years on end; so time unread isn’t a consideration.
Saving books is so overrated. If I know I’ll realistically never read a book again, it goes in the garbage. If there’s an ebook of it available, AND the book doesn’t have any maps, important photos or charts (you wouldn’t believe how many ebooks leave that part out), it goes in the garbage. This is how I went from having 2 booksshelves to having one of them. Books aren’t your friends. They are inanimate objects that take up space. If you think otherwise, you really need to get out of the house more.
I had a new roommate move in about a month ago who brought literally THOUSANDS of books. And most of these books are just plain crap. I’m even worried that they’re going to bring famine into my apartment. I hid a note saying “ok, fine, you can keep them. Sorry for pestering you” in one random book of his. If he EVER finds it, I’ll be amazed.
Yep. These days I only buy Stephen King, to keep my collection up to date. Other than that, I might own fifty books. Some are childhood books I can’t let go, others are just darn good books. While I admit I’m extremely unlikely to re-read them, it feels pretty good when I can grab a book off my shelf and put it in one of the kids’ hands, with a whole-hearted recommendation.
I don’t consider neatly shelved books to be clutter, either. My family has been acquiring books at an alarming rate the last few years, but my husband has built some beautiful bookshelves to accommodate them. When we eventually run out of wall space then I suppose I will start to give away our least favorites.
Right now I give away books that I didn’t enjoy but I keep all the rest. It makes me happy to have them in the house and they aren’t bothering anybody. My kids can have a giant bonfire when I’m dead.
I’m not done weeding through my book collection, but like a couple people above, I feel now that the library is perfectly able to store my reading for me. I have gotten rid of a couple thousand books, with some unknown hundreds left to go.
The way things are going here in California I have the unpleasant sensation that the libraries may end up being shut down or drastically cut back. And besides; quite often they don’t have what I want. I used to depend more on the library until I kept finding that books I wanted to reread were no longer being carried.
This may be true for some locations, but around here most donated books are sold to raise funds, re-donated, or discarded. Libraries have a mission to provide material people are interested in reading, not store stuff no one else wants.
I did not mean they would keep the books I donate. I mean that I consider the library my library.
My rule is “am I likely to want to read this again?” If the answer is “Yes,” I keep it; if the answer is “No,” I give it away, either by sending it to my mom or sister if I think either would be interested in it, or by waiting until I have a shelf-full (and I do have a small “to be given away” shelf), boxing them up, and taking them down to the used book store. If the used book store doesn’t want 'em, they go in the dumpster out back. They don’t go back in my car or back to my house.
A year would not be enough time to keep a book for me. I am one of those people who will go back and re-read a book, maybe multiple times, and I have too often found myself back at B&N buying a new copy of a book I know I already owned, but apparently have given away.
I’ve found that the best way to be very rigorious in the “keep v. toss” decisions, is to plan to move. When every book you keep becomes one more book you’re going to have to schlep from house A to house B, the standards for “keepers” goes way up.
ETA: And I do periodically go through the “keepers” and think, “I kept this because I thought I’d read it again. Now a couple years have gone by. Have I read this again? If not, am I likely to read it again now?” If the answer to those is “No,” the book is no longer a keeper.
I never get rid of books. I just get more shelves. I keep everything pretty much forever. I can’t part with them. I still have every one of my old college textbooks. Books are not clutter, they’re treasure.