I want to make clear, regarding my answer above, that I am a person that has strong clutter/hoarding tendencies. My house is currently very tidy, neat, and organized, except for a few problem areas like the laundry room and garage. For me to keep it this way takes a lot of work and constant vigilance to avoid sliding into old habits. Being ruthless about getting rid of things that take up space is key to this. If you’re a naturally neat/organized person, or even if you’re not but you don’t care about neatness, I think this is far less of a problem. But seriously, if I get a few extra books that don’t really fit on a shelf somewhere, then what will happen is that they will sit on the floor next to the couch or something, and then I’ll throw other random stuff there that I can’t figure out what to do with, and before long that entire corner of the room is an impassable pile of junk.
Trust me, I know how crazy this sounds, but that’s just how it is for me. Better to just acquire less stuff in the first place.
But it doesn’t sound crazy at all. That’s how I live too, and I don’t have the least bit of hoarding tendency. I just don’t like to be weighed down by “stuff” that I don’t want to be responsible for and/or that I don’t want to be important to me. And it’s just common sense to realize that if you get rid of things one at a time, over time (books go out as you have no further use for them), then you never have to face the dismaying task of trying to deal with an entire pile of books (or clothes, or papers, or junk, or whatever) sometime in the future. You are choosing to live an organized life and to make the effort necessary to keep yourself organized. There’st absolutely nothing crazy about it.
I know whereof you speak, sister. I’ve conquered a lot of my clutterbug tendencies by refusing to endow inanimate objects with feelings that can be hurt or value beyond what they bring me. Books were a big hurdle!
We tried going that route. We had some success with my tech books, but a lot of my fantasy books just didn’t sell. I’m not sure what they were being priced at - I had given them to a friend’s son so that he could earn some money. They told me though that they were barely making a profit, after shipping.
My rule of thumb about getting rid of books is…,
If my house would burn down and I got all the money to rebuild what book wouldn’t I buy again. Those are the books I give away to small town libraries.
Nightfall
Nightfall, I like that rule! That works for all possessions, not just books. I need to apply that to the things I own to figure out what I would or wouldn’t replace.
Part of my problem is that I like weird books. The books I like are invariably not in the library, are out of print, are not easy to get. So I hang on to them longer than I otherwise would. I like to re-read, too. (My local library’s budget is now small enough that I can only have 12 ILLs per year, so I have to ration them carefully–and anyway they can only come from a fairly small area so I’m often out of luck.)
I avoid buying anything I can get at the library, and I don’t buy much, but I still have an awful lot of books. I get a lot of used and library discard books (my kids’ shelves are filled with library discards) for little or no money.
I do get rid of books, but there’s a net gain. Just the other day, though, I indulged in a little mental exercise–if we lost everything, couldn’t keep the house, had to get rid of everything, which books would I keep? In such a case I could let go of most of them–but whoof, there are some tricky ones. And I’d have to ask my mom to keep my complete set of Yale Shakespeare in her basement. (This was brought on by staying at my brother’s new house, which was purchased from a family that became unemployed and had to sell. Despite being penniless, they refused to let go of their expensive furniture and rented two storage units for the stuff. :smack:)
(This was brought on by staying at my brother’s new house, which was purchased from a family that became unemployed and had to sell. Despite being penniless, they refused to let go of their expensive furniture and rented two storage units for the stuff. :smack:)