This is just an anecdote from yesterday that I know Dopers will appreciate.
The wife and I went to an estate sale yesterday. At one point we found ourselves alone in the basement with nobody except one of the estate workers present. Out of the blue, she sighed and said, “OK, I just have to vent here. This has been bothering me all day. Look at all these books! Why on earth would someone own so many books? I just don’t understand people! Boxes and boxes! Look! There are more over there, and there!”
She was out of her mind with disbelief. I immediately thought of you SDMB folks.
If there were any there on topics of interest to me, I’d be trying to make a deal with her to rescue as many as I could :).
Last time I moved, we had 40 small moving boxes (used smalls for weight reasons). I’m sure we have more now, 95%+ are mine. I’d probably have given the proudly aliterate worker heart failure.
I was once helping friends when their house was on a local house tour. One woman walked upstairs, glanced at a room full of books, shuddered & said “there are too many books in this house!”. I told her there was no such thing as too many books. She then informed me that she gets one book at a time, reads it & disposes of it before getting another.
She also definitely did not approve of the small - and completely filled - bookcase in the bathroom.
When I visit a new acquaintance’s residence for the first time I consciously judge them on their bookshelf. Someone with no books in their house is someone I choose not to get to know further. They may continue to be a casual acquaintance but they will never be a friend.
It would take a lot of books, literally taking over the space and making it unlivable, for me to say “that’s too many books.”
When we were preparing to move out of our 3, 600 s.f. house in Atlanta two years ago, we had over 2,200 books (every one of them logged in the Library Thing app).
The staging consultant our real estate agent brought in looked at the walls full of books in the living room and basement and said, “You should get rid of all these books before we show the house.” Apparently she thought having lots of books would turn off buyers. (And walls full of empty shelves would have looked better?)
We found this funny, because the main thing that had clinched our decision to buy our previous house in Las Vegas had been its extensive built-in bookshelves.
Needless to say, we weren’t going to move, hide, or get rid of 2,200 books just for a week’s worth of showings. We left every book in place, and our eventual buyers said that the books were one of the things they liked best about the house.
Because we were moving to a house less than half the size, we gave away about half the books before we moved, leaving quite a few of them with the new owners, a young couple who were very happy to get them.
Books personalize a house and make it harder for a buyer to picture it as their house. When you are staging a house, you want the decor to be as neutral as possible. Books do the opposite since the personalized interest is written right on the spine.
Heh. Back when I was last house-hunting, I toured one place, where I took a look at the books the owner had on his shelves in his home office. I immediately declared, “This guy is a spy!”, because he had the same mix of books that the father of a friend of mine used to have, and said father was definitely a spy.
I do like having a decent number of books in the house, especially favourites that I will probably re-read at some point… But as long as we have libraries and the Internet, I don’t really see the point of keeping a vast home collection.
Possesion of a large library used to be be a required status symbol of wealth, I suppose.
A cousin recently died. She had hundreds if not thousands of books. Before her death she said some where signed by the author and could be very valuable. My time is valuable too.
There is a three car garage full of crap. Books, furniture, god knows what.
I’ve talked to my other cousin (the deceased’s sister). And suggested a garage sale. Go in look around and you can have anything you can carry for $10. We need that cleaned out.
My mother also recently died. She had some nice stuff. But the estate sale person did not think it worth their time. There’s a bunch of crystal and gold rimmed plates and nice furniture. Shit, not sure what we are gonna do. Try some other estate sale places I guess.
I learned while on an Elizabethan country house tour that illiterate noblemen would buy books by the yard, not by the title, to fill their shelves, even if they couldn’t read a word in ‘em.
you seem to confuse the physical format “book” with the drive to learn/acquire knowlege.
I have few to no books, b/c:
a.) I don’t really enjoy poetry (so that puts about 50% of the books out of equation)
b.) I find books a very inefficient way to acquire new knowledge in the fast paced world we live in … (books are normally too long to transmit the central idea (for commercial reasons, I assume) … and then I have to wade through 200-300 pages to just learn one person’s POV (which might or might not be “correct”)) …
c.) books by definition are outdated … between an event and holding a book in hand it takes - at least 6-12 months … I’d rather know more about a given topic (e.g. russian invasion in UKR) a couple of days after the event instead of 9 months later
d.) books (authors!) nearly always have an agenda … (e.g. the latest and greates paradigm for management) and spoon-feed you what they think is right (well - makes THEM money)
e.) lack of interactivity / counterarguments
f.) I found that very view books that I bought/read were worth the time/cost … (Elias Canetti’s - Macht und Masse ranking very high for me - and was totally worth the time)
g.) more often than not, you need to make quite an investment in time to just reckon “damn, that book sucks” … (and then the sunk-cost-fallacy comes to bite you in the arse)
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So, in my case, books are a thing of the past and I very much prefer different/faster/more diverse/more interactive formats like the SDMB et al to get a way more diverse POV
IMO books were the best things that was between the 1500s and the 2000s … but today - not so much anymore.
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ps: same for music: I swapped a “library” of 20meters CDs into having them in one pinky nail sized chip that travels with me 24/7 and provides more happiness than the old “format”
… oh … and I do not judge people regards of the phys. format of media
Even after getting rid of a ton of books before we moved, there are still something like 16 shelves full of the damn things. Despite my admonishment, the wife still orders more on a regular basis. She reads them, but then what? Nobody wants books and it just adds to the piles and the clutter. I’ve given up. Makes me hope I die first so as not to be stuck with getting rid of it all.
Yeah, I’ve decided I’m not buying another physical book unless I desperately need it and it’s not available on Kindle. I’m almost 68, and I don’t want or need any more stuff.
