Throw it out (or, rather, recycle it in the proper bin). I love books but don’t believe every single book ever should be lept somewhere.
This thread reminds me that the scrap metal guys are going to be in my neighborhood tomorrow and the scrapyard I’ve been amassing must go to the curb. I was intending to use it for welding practice, but never got around to cutting things up.
Also, the pump from the old hot tub. No idea what the hell I was going to do with that.
My husband is one of your crowd. Every time he upgrades his computer, he ends up with a pile of cables which he needs to keep ‘just in case’. It got so that I couldn’t close the drawer they were kept in, so he got the ultimatum. In the end, he threw the lot out because he had no idea what cable was for what purpose.
Just for the record - I don’t donate expecting that that particular library will have that particular book available to me at some unknown future time. I do it because I know they use the donations for book sales to raise funds to buy the items they do want, and the odds seem high that I can obtain the book somehow, somewhere, should I ever decide I want to read A Tale of Two Cities again. In the meantime, it isn’t cluttering up my house.
I don’t keep all of them, just some of them.
Some of us find that hard to do. Half Price Books provides a good service for people like that. They presumably recycle the books they don’t want, but I can tell myself that they’re going to resell every book I sell to them. It’s not the same psychologically as throwing the book in the recycle bin myself. It gives me a mental out, kind of like giving one member of a firing squad a blank round.
I used a great deal of patience with my husband in this regard. I took the ‘cable ball’ (seriously they were so tangled they all came out of the bin together), carefully seperated each cable, asked what it was for, coiled it up properly and put a zip tie on it to keep it that way.
Once they were all laid out, we discovered that there were power cords for things we no longer owned, five printer cables, etc.
He got rid of a bunch of them and now (since they are organized and coiled) we can actually find one when we need it.
When it’s something like a Dickens novel, yes, you can probably get it again. I read science fiction and fantasy, though, and in most cases, once a book or magazine passes out of my hands it’s going to be very hard to find it again. It’s somewhat easier nowadays, with the internet, but still a great many books have been recycled or thrown away, and they are unlikely to be printed again.
Well yeah. Charles Dickens goes. For science fiction, even Ray Bradbury goes. Fredric Brown stays!
At the end of the day, that what it’s about, for me - I had to get over the generalized concept of “It’s a book, I’m keeping it” to which books are really worth keeping. Rinse, repeat for everything, really.
You still need to know what use the “some” are; he never does.
Very handy. I wish I were that organized with my Massive Craft Stash, but I am married to a Chaos Muppet. Any major organization I do with it is ruined the first time he needs something from it for his own arts or crafts.
Throw it away. It may sound harsh, but that’s what libraries do with books that are weeded that nobody wants from the give-away/sales carts. We don’t just hang onto them forever, hoping someone will need it once it’s two generations out of date.
If you’d read along in the sentence, you’d see I added two options there. 
But yes, excessive throwing away of things leads to just as many problems as hoarding all the things.
You can also donate weird unwanted books to the Book Thing. They’ll take anything, and people often go there specifically to get the weirdest stuff possible.
As a computer person who also keeps all manner of “old” cables, I have to say it can actually be very useful. Not sure where your gadget’s charger is? Oh look, here’s a mini USB cable in my Cablearium. Want to move the printer and realise it’s now slightly too far from the computer for the cable to reach? How convenient, there’s a longer one in Martini’s Cable Emporium! Visiting friend wants to connect their laptop to the TV to share their holiday photos and forgot the connecting cable? There’s a pretty good likelihood Cablerama by Martini has the right one.
And that’s without getting into the fact a lot of printers and AV products nowadays don’t come with the connecting cables, so having spares (if not for yourself, then for friends and family) is, IMHO, practical.
I seem to remember her hand making all (or most) of my clothes, I don’t remember her making anyone else’s clothes, only mine (in those days it was much cheaper to make your own clothes). I don’t remember her using her stored buttons or zips on anything though…
That’s what my boyfriend calls it. I say it’s not a word, but I see a few people using it here. Can’t you just give the hole punch to the Goodwill, or sell it on eBay if it’s not too much trouble? It probably IS too much trouble, but I search for everything there. When my favorite cork-backed metal ruler went missing, there one was, for $1 (plus maybe $3-4 in shipping). I’m sure it’s not worth the effort to sell things for $1, but I hate to see good stuff wasted. At least donate stuff, for god’s sake, anything that’s any good at all, instead of cramming landfills with recyclable stuff. :eek: