What the Hell Kind of Person Throws Out Books?!

The BBQ Pit
41

Yeah, someone needs to remind the architects who design libraries that functionality and the ability to store a reasonable number of books should be the primary considerations during the design process. I’m not saying the building needs to be ugly, but function needs to be considered at least as important as form.

When my university library was built (some years before i arrived), they decided that they didn’t want a tall building messing up the lowrise skylline of the campus, so they built a library with two floors above ground and four floors underground. The only problem with this is that those four floors have nowhere near enough space to hold all the university’s books, so thousands and thousands are stored at an off-site facility and have to be ordered online so they can be brought in.

I don’t know about anyone else, but if i’m looking for information in a library, i like to be able to browse the shelves in the general vicinty of the appropriate call number. Having to search for everything in an online catalog isn’t what libraries are about, IMO. I know that remote storage is inevitable at a massive operation like the Library of Congress, but a university should have browsable stacks, at least for its general collections.

If you’re in the Baltimore area and have books you don’t want, or if you’re looking for some free books, there’s a great local operation called The Book Thing. These folks take in donated books and give them away free to anyone who wants them. They are open every Saturday and Sunday, and you can go and look through the books and take as many as you want. In fact, they encourage people to take large armfuls.

It’s a great place to go if you’re looking for some light reading for the airplane. There are hundreds and hundreds of mainstream fiction books. There are also, however, quite frequently good academic and scholarly works. I’ve picked up quite a few excellent history, economics, political science and sociology books.

All they ask is that, before you take the books, you stamp the frontispiece of each one with a stamp (which they provide) that says:

Not for Resale
This is a free book

The Book Thing of Baltimore, Inc.

They do this because, early in the program, used bookstore owners were coming in and stocking up on free books, with the intention of selling them in their stores.

42

One of my most unpleasant memories to relate here. Sorry in advance for indulging in a bit of personal angst in the Pit. Consider it a mini-pitting and an overdue apology.

My mom owned a used bookstore and was a book collector for as long as I knew her. After her store shut down, the massive collection ended up in one huge room in our house. It had everything from worn but decent first editions of mysteries to strange 1920s manuals for “better sex lives for sane living” to a plethora of children’s series books from the late 1800s/early 1900s to obscure biographies.

She died when I was 19. A few years later, my father was selling our house and needed to get rid of the books. He had no clue about whether they were valuable or useful to be carted off to a library. Now Pop was a very smart man, practical and cultured, and why he didn’t do due dilligence on figuring out what to do and arranging it, I don’t know.

I was 23. Still very immature in many ways, still depressed and even four years later, still finding it hard to believe my mom was dead, my pop was dating someone new, and the beloved house where I grew up was going to be sold.

Anyway, I offered to find some appropriate way to find the books a new home, and made a few half-hearted attempts. Some, we sold to collectors. Some we kept for sentimental reasons – an edition of Shakespeare’s First Folio, not very good quality (with some missing pages and penciled-in notes from scholarly past owners) but still, a first edition; firsts of Dickens’ Mystery of Edwin Drood and of the British publication of Kennedy’s Why England Slept.

But most were left undisposed-of. And one rainy day after the house had been emptied of most of our furniture and was close to being sold, I came home to visit and say goodbye and saw a huge pile of books and boxes of books in the driveway, half-covered by a plastic tarp but still exposed to the elements. Waiting for the trash collectors to haul them away.

I can’t describe the pain and nausea I felt then, looking at these ruined books. I still feel it in my gut. My mom taught me from an early age to treasure books: don’t lay the books open, don’t open rare books too wide, never throw a book, never write in them or dog-ear the pages. And now I was staring at a betrayal of all those lessons. A betrayal of her values, too, for she was charitable and would have wanted these books to go to a library or hospital or even St. Vincent’s Thrift Shop.

I mourned then and still do. Not just the waste of it all, but the loss of years and years of my mom’s careful collecting and loving ownership. The loss of my mom, yet again. God, how I hated my poor father that day. But mostly I hated myself for feeling helpless, and for not having been able to save them out of laziness or stubbornness or pure fear of giving away books that had meant so much to my mother – maybe all three.

The regret I feel now is still sickening, fifteen years later. I forgave my pop; I suspect he was just as torn as I was. But as a booklover and daughter I haven’t forgiven myself for my utter stupidity and impotence that resulted in the pointless desecration of those wonderful, eclectic old books.

I’m so sorry, Mom. They – and you – deserved better.

43

Ooh, I’ll have to take a spare suitcase the next time I go to Baltimore!

I feel downright guilty about throwing out books. I’ve almost never done it, except when a book was damaged beyond repair. Even then, I feel bad.

I do need to sort through my books and get rid of some of them, but even the sorting is hard, because I’ll start and come across a book I haven’t seen in a while and the next thing I know it’s been half an hour and I’m well into the book.

Books are my friends. You don’t trash your friends!

44

I resold my copy because it was a big shiny hardcover! However, the paperback “Stranger in a Strange Land” deservingly bit the dust.
The Book Thing? That’s almost enough to restore my hopes for humanity which were damaged reading the OP!

45

My in-laws are packrats and recently moved from a 2100 square foot house to a 750 square foot condo. We had to clean out the house. You’ll note if you do a search in GQ that I spent a lot of time going through old books. I’m happy to say I found homes for about 80% of the hardcovers and antique books (some of 'em ended up in MY home). However. Mom-in-law is a compulsive shopper, and over the last few years she’s been unable to get many places - but she managed to make nearly daily trips to WalMart, where she purchased every single paperback book on the shelves. I found most of them stored in underbed storage boxes - TWENTY-SEVEN OF THEM. Most have been read, but not all. The local used bookstore owner (see my entry in Lynn Bodoni’s Used Book Store thread) wouldn’t come out to the house to collect them, and frankly, I can’t drag 27 big boxes of books to her, especially knowing that she likes to pick and choose, and I’d probably end up bringing 26 boxes back home. Trust me, I even offered to give them to her free. The local hospitals wouldn’t take them - they said they’ve been inundated with books. The library won’t take them, as it’s a brand new building and they no longer have a “books for sale” rack - plus they won’t shelve donated books in the library itself. Local nursing homes were also a “No, thanks” because they feel contemporary novels and murder mysteries are inappropriate reading material for the elderly. So I had a garage sale and priced the books at 50 cents each - I sold about 50 of them, and another 50 when I knocked the price down to a quarter each. This left me with 19 big boxes of books. Goodwill and the Salvation Army declined to take the remainder - they claim books don’t sell well there (which I find odd, since I buy most of MY books there!)

So they ended up in a dumpster. And believe me, I was close to vomiting when I watched all those books tumble into the dumpster.

46

I try not to throw books away but I certainly don’t think it’s some big outragious act if someone does. I also have thrown an American flag away in the garbage before. People throw newspapers and magazines away all the time. What about a magazine full of short fiction… is it horrible to throw that away?

I think it’s more wasteful to buy books in the first place if they are something you will only read once or twice and you have access to a library.

47

That’s just evil. I guess some people are not fit to live in decent neighborhoods.

We rescued bound copies of New Orleans newspapers from about 1902 that was being thrown away by my school library once - I wish we could have saved more. Fascinating reading. All libraries should at least offer books for free - I got my sampling theory book from work that way, and I’m glad I have it - just used it again recently.

My mother grew up during the Depression, and only got books for her birthday. She’s probably the cause of my inability to get rid of them. It’s even hard for me to sell duplicates.

Voyager - soaking in the healthful rays emitted from the 6,000 books surrounding me.

48

Eh. My neighborhood in Brooklyn – book-happy enough to support THREE fine used bookshops, within five blocks of each other – has a kind of open-air Book Thing going on.

When I have some books on hand I don’t want any more, I set them out, spine-up, along my stoop (when there’s no rain in the forecast, of course). They’re gone within a few hours.

And once or twice each week I find similar caches on other stoops. I’ve helped myself to all sorts of goodies.

49

Since my mother is a librarian, I was raised to respect books and what they stand for. On the other hand, my classroom seems to be a magnet for every history/government textbook that doesn’t have a home at my school. Since this means I get the books of retiring teachers, they are most often quite outdated. These I have no problem pitching into the dumpster. But literature? Never! That is what all the retirement homes in the area are for. :smiley:

50

I cannot even comprehend throwing away books.

I was raised with a HUGE love for books, and read voraciously to this day. I am up to 3 6-foot bookshelves, and they’re overfilled and desparately in need of another bookshelf. I can’t even line em up anymore properly so I can see all the spines (of which I usually have alphabetized, separated into different “sections” by genre), they’re just stacked on the shelves atm till I buy a new bookshelf for more room.

I read every single one of these books, repeatedly. I won’t even throw away my 1970’s copy of The Phantom Tollbooth, even though it’s so old it’s fallen apart into 4 different sections now and is kept held together by a rubber band.

If I saw something like the OP, I’d break into absolute tears, I swear.

My dream is to someday have a big enough house that I’ll be able to have a room filled with nothing but books, and maybe a comfy chair or two. Books, floor to ceiling, on every wall, covering every space… sighs happily

51

On an additional note, to this day, there’s no book that can make me cry like Fahrenheit 451…just the thought of not being able to read sets me off. :frowning:

52

Our library has an annual booksale. Many people donate books for it, and a lot has to be thrown out. 30 year old textbooks, books of all genres in poor condition, Reader’s Digest Condensed books, and so on. Folks use the donation bin a a trash dump sometimes.

The folks who do the initial triage on what to keep and what to throw into the recycling box have guidelines. No National Geographics from after the 50’s, unless it’s the current year, no Readers Digest, no encyclopedias that are over ten years old, and so on.

It’s that latter rule that got me, about two weeks ago, the almost complete series of “Great Works of Western Literature” published by the Encyclopedia Britannica,
folks were thrown out. The copyright is 1991, so they were tossed. The books are in prisitine condition,and there was no sense in throwing them away, as they are not encyclopedias of current info, but a collection of the great works of fiction, history, and philosophy of the Western world. Of the 53 volumes in the set, only #14, Plutarch, is missing. I don’t know whether to find it and buy it to complete the set, keeping it for myself, or to give it away as it is to a school that would appreciate it, or needs it. Anyone know a school in need?

53

OK, I must be missing something. The OP is talking about throwing away ruined books. Ruined! Ruined by a torntial downpour, so I can only imagine that had gotton really, really wet.

It’s been my experience that books that get a good soaking turn out to be really gross, both in texture and in aroma.

I wouldn’t keep such things in my house. And who the hell would want them?

Eve, is it possible that the books water damaged *before * the rainstorm? Maybe left in a basement that was flooded by a water pipe break?

54

I can’t bring myself to throw away books either. That said, a book is a container, nothing more. People who burn books and people who are morally outraged by that are confusing the container for the contents, which is either superstition or fetishism.

When I see books discarded or destroyed, I try to comfort myself with the fact that, if they were given away or sold, it would harm writers and publishers, who create the books I profess to love. Or if they were simply kept, unread and unloved, it has the same effect as throwing them away. Of course, this rationalization doesn’t work in a lot of instances, such as if the books are out of print, but I try to hum a few bars of “circle of life,” and soldier on. Yes, it’s a terrible waste, and there are lots of good causes to which books can be donated. But it’s a lot harder to spot the person who might benefit from reading a particular book than it is the one who looks as if she could use a decent meal, and how many tons of edible food do we throw away daily (pea-infested rice especially)?

If we are talking about destroying copies of books in numbers that affect the availability of the ideas contained therein, that’s a crime. One person throwing away or even burning one copy of a particular book that isn’t rare is either a personal expression of opinion or an act of expedience, and I’m not inclined to judge the one and not equipped, not knowing the circumstances, to judge the other. Book dealers should and probably do compile an endangered book list. Perhaps throwing away a copy of one could be punished the same way you would be for, oh, shooting a condor. But mostly, books are just the way we convey ideas, and their value is not the lump of paper and leather and buckram, though there can be art and beauty there too.

55

Guys, if you find boxes of soggy books, don’t assume they’re not salvageable. They can be saved! Museums have very low-tech and simple techniques for saving soaked books in case of flooding that are well within the reach of most people.

If anyone has this issue in the future, ask me, and I’ll direct you to all the resources that can help you, and get you step-by-step directions.

56

A old lady from my church has a bunch of old books from a storage shed that she gave me. I graciously took them but really, they were AFAI could tell, unsalvagable- so I soon after disposed of them. And several of these books I would have really enjoyed keeping.

57

Hey, I just got myself that exact same set (only I have Plutarch, too, heh heh) from the library sale. My library has a weekly sale, and they get that set a few times a year. Almost nobody wants it, and it usually goes to a local interior decorator for $20; they don’t even bother to put the books out anymore (my mom and I both see the donations table a lot, because we’re both involved with the library, so we got first dibs on this one). I asked them to save the next set for a friend who was jealous of ours.

It’s handsome, but not very practical. Who needs The brothers Karamazov in tall hardback, when you could buy a pocket edition for a couple of bucks? We’re happy because of all the early science texts–I just finished reading parts of Hippocrates and Galen, while DangerDad is reading Newton–and the religion and philosophy we didn’t already own, but not many people actually want that stuff and there are more sets around than there are people who want them. Most of the works most people actually want to read are more easily found elsewhere.

I say keep it for yourself if you’ll enjoy it. Good luck finding Plutarch.

58

Where were those??? And howcome I missed them in the several times I read that book???

59

I could be wrong, but the impression I got was that when the neighbors had left the books out the night before, they were not ruined, but had been ruined during the night by some rain. So in other words, presumably the neighbors had left out perfectly good books. Then it rained in the middle of the night, which ruined the books—before someone like Eve could rescue them the next morning.

60

Hmm, this sounds pretty much like how I deal with them. If they’re truly excrement, they get tossed into the trash. If they’re just not to my taste I “donate” them by leaving them someplace where they can find a good home (study areas at the college, hotel rooms etc).

I have a book that I don’t know what to do with it. It’s “The Stand”. Somehow I lost two of the pages. I’m getting ready to have a garage sale, and I don’t know whether to throw it away or not. If someone’s read it already, and doesn’t mind (the missing pages aren’t in a terribly crucial spot). then I’d give it to them.

I’m thinking of putting it in my freebie box or something. I can’t bring myself to throw it away.