I have a black female friend from Barbados, Julie, whose parents threw out all her stuff, too, so . . . No. As much as we do all hate the first-world white males and jeer at their problems.
Hoarders had an episode with a couple who had accumulated 500,000 books in their home. Preview here, snarky commentary here, full video here.
As one commenter noted, they were probably saving a bundle on heating and cooling costs.
Ooooh, paperbackswap.com!
Sign up, list your books, and when somebody requests them, send them out. Yes, you have to actually do the mailing (though it’s easy to bulk buy the appropriate mailing envelopes), but you get rewarded when you’re looking for a book that somebody else has!
Practical karma cultivation for bibliovores.
“Ramonas”? Do those have anything to do with the 1884 novel by Helen Hunt Jackson, which was set in Southern California? I only know about it because I live here and I happen to be a local history buff. In its time, Ramona was probably the first mass media blockbuster that focused on the region; I doubt if L.A. itself had more than 20K people at that time. To this day an annual outdoor Ramona pageant still takes place in the distant town of Hemet, but otherwise it’s something most people around here don’t know about unless they seek out local history sources. It’s something at the very edge of our cultural memory, like orange crate stickers.
Why would gender have anything to do with it?
A couple years ago I tried to sell some of my books. When I rattled off some of the titles the Book Store Lady said “Not interested.”
I said Well, what are you looking for?
She said, “The ones you aren’t willing to give up.”
Chilled my heart. I hung up.
I didn’t want to blubber here, but…when I was going away to college, I went thru my room and collected all my stuff. Things I’d written from a kid on up. All my Beatles memorabilia. Traded school pictures, ticket stubs, everything my high school first love had ever given me, my scrapbook from the Senior Trip…I packed it all into a cardboard box and put it in my closet.
The first weekend I came home I noticed it was gone. I went downstairs and asked my mother about it. She said she’d been cleaning and had my stepfather haul it off with the other trash.
My mother wasn’t exactly a housekeeper. In fact, the joke about people having to move when stuff finally gets so dirty kind of hits home. I totally understand her snooping thru my room after I’d gone; I might have done it, too. But when she found the closed cardboard box in my closet, I do NOT believe she just hauled it out and had it thrown away. She opened it. Saw what was inside. Then threw it away.
That is awful. Did you ever forgive her?
When my mother had the nerve to move to Florida in 1941 to work for the Navy–at the age of 20–her mother spitefully threw out all her childhood books and toys. All my mother had from her childhood was what she took with her to Miami.
Has nothing to do with that; it was the children’s series by Beverly Cleary. Thanks for the response, though; you brought up some good points.
Well, Hello Again pointed out that all I had lost was things. As first-world white males are perhaps the most notoriously acquisitive creatures about, I acknowledged that, yes, losing pretty much all my childhood possessions (mostly books) was a particularly first-world white male problem, since we are notoriously greedy hoarders of all that is good and desirable. Yes, I’m somewhat materialistic. Still hurts.
Kindles have made deaquisitioning books a great deal easier, at least for popular titles. I learned years ago to buy multiple copies of books I knew I was going to lend. Makes it easier on the soul when they never come back. I must have purchased a dozen copies of Wyrd Sisters and Guards! Guards! over the years, and at least 2 dozen copies of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. If I never get them back from students I at least know they got out there into the mass of books for sale at university used book stores.
I’m still coming to terms with a lot of things. (Wah wah wah. lol) We never talked about it again.
You know how some things are just so…rotten that you basically just go on as if it never happened? I guess I’ve forgiven her because I let it go.
When I was a child in El Salvador, someone talked my parents into buying a set of encyclopedias and a set of books of stories and poems for children. I adored those books and read and reread them for hours, since I had almost no friends and not much reason to go outside and play. When we had to leave because of the civil war, I was forced to leave those books behind. I think this contributed to my being a book hoarder. I married a fellow book hoarder, and when we split up, he left most of his books behind. I’m going to have to get rid of several books, since I plan to move soon, and it’s going to be heartbreaking for me to decide what to sell/donate/whatever. On the plus side, maybe my ex will finally pick up his boxes of books. Among them are several anthropology books I would hate to throw away, but soon won’t have room to keep.
It was own fault, but after I moved to Europe my parents later moved to another state in the USA and didn’t want to schlep my books so they gave them away.
I had an autographed copy of Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman - I had gone to the Chicago Seven trial in Chicago and asked Abbie to autograph it. Abbie took the book, quickly signed it and gave it back. He had written, “Fuck off” and signed his name. I cherished that bit of personal lunacy.
I also had one odd collection. I loved Catcher In The Rye as a high school kid, and then started picking up every paperback copy of any book I could find that had a blurb on the back that said, “…like Catcher In The Rye…”. I probably had 20 or more paperbacks all with similar quotes, hoping to cash in on the popularity of Catcher at the time. I am sure most of those other books are no longer in print as most of them were a pale imitation at best. Still, it was fun when people came over and I could read those blurbs one after another - lots of laughs.
However, the big problem with moving a lot is priorities in what gets moved. Books are heavy and expensive to ship. So - even if my parents had not given them away, my guess is I would have had to do so at some point anyway.
DMark…an autographed copy of Steal This Book. I’m standing here in quiet admiration and respect. (We had our own arrested # group where I come from.)