I Threw Out 50 Books Today...

It wasn't easy but it had to be done. We are bursting at the seams and need to lighten our load.The books I threw out were all old yellowed paperbacks, many with either water damage, bent or ripped or missing pages, or markings too unintelligible to ever be of use again. Some were "doubles" and some were cheap (usually Dover) editions of works that I had in other formats. They weren't even books that could be given away. I would be turned away at any respectable bookstore and probably run off my street if I was to try to have a stoop sale.

But even with the guilt free knowledge of the necessity of it all it was a melancholy day. Out went William Blake; out went Thomas Traherne; Plato was discarded three times over, Edgeworth twice. A water-damaged Mary Shelley was hard to part with as I don't know when I might see her again, though frankly a marked up Norton Critical Edition of Percy Bysshe was a relief to be rid of. I didn't even realize I owned Tom Clancy. Well now I don't. Andre Hodeir argued with me fiercely, but I put him out next to Conrad and some Cavalier poets. The Blind Owl was left to consider the state of dark wisdom from the perch of the Thursday night curb. I threw out 3 copies of Madame Bovary, leaving two behind (all 5 translated by Steegmuller). I threw out a very old very yellowed paperback copy of Harry Kemelman's Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet, a book I acquired more than 10 years ago at the American Studies Department of the University of Innsbruck, where I rescued it from being discarded (it being yellow even then). My goal was 100. I had a quota and conviction. But the more I pruned, the harder it got. I had to stop thinking like a collector and consider the likely use these books would get, the use that *I* personally could give them or get from them, and only such twisted and perverse thinking allowed me to proceed. But it was bibliocide, and my conscience kicked in just as I got to around 50. I turned and looked at a semi-worn Rebecca West. I eyed the cover and the muscular paragraphs and the lithe sentences. I put the book down, and that day I threw out no more.

I can only imagine what it would be like to decimate a library like this, not just a collection. In some ways it would be easier to weed, because you could submit the task to the discipline of criteria and rules, and not get caught up in the erotics of it, the sensual nature of paper and bindings and memories, and the stark authority of it all. You could simply deselect a set number of books and mark each one for reassignment according to such practical matters as how infrequently it has been looked at, or requested, or touched, or how much dust it had accumulated, the dust of its own disintegrating self, loosed from the body of the book and redescended in a certain thickness. As if that was a bad thing.