Parting with Books

 You may have noticed that when I said I was reading the Philosophy of Religion in bed this was because it is one of the only books I have left on my shelves.  

I have been slowly but surely relieving myself of my book collection and it has been much easier than I thought it would be. 

The reason I started this exercise is because I will eventually move into a smaller property, most likely to be an apartment, and I do not wish to have a lot of belongings left by that stage and I do not wish to be heaving a lot of heavy books with me.  I need to start moving items out and not leave it until the time comes when I move and have it all to do in a hurry. 

I used to love my book collection as much as anybody else loves books and I kept everything but about 20 years ago I stopped keeping fiction and off-loaded all my fiction collection, almost entirely paperbacks, so that was a good start to the current clearance. 

(I continue to read fiction of course but ever since then I have had a policy of handing paperbacks straight on to charity shops.   So there is no fiction to be dealt with in this cull). 

The two other collections I had were maps and art books.   The maps went first, about 5 years ago in fact.   I was clinging on to these and the first step was to sort them and where I had two or three maps of the same country I reduced to only one.  This was much easier than I thought and I bagged them up for the charity shops.  It was so easy and a realisation that I really never touch the maps at all and if I want to check a location I Google it so I happily took the next step and admitted to myself that apart from looking in the atlas occasionally I really don't miss the maps at all and so I did another cull.  I just kept the city maps.  And then the final step I parted with those as well.  The only maps I have left are street maps of Norwich, Great Yarmouth  and London.  All the rest have gone and I truly do not miss them.  I still have my father's school atlas, my school atlas and a paperback atlas I bought quite recently for up to date borders. 

Now the major step of my art books came along.  They are the catalogues of shows I have been to in London and mostly published by the Tate Publishing Company or Thames and Hudson.  I started with parting with just three to see how it felt.  I felt nothing.  This is how they originated: I would visit a show, buy the catalogue,  read it on the train on the way home,  file on the shelf.  Quite honestly I haven't looked at them for years.  So three went.  Then another three and so on and so forth.  I set a kind of target to deal with a minimum of three each week.  

I have had to go further afield with the deliveries to charity shops because charity shops have difficulty with reference books, they don't want to be over-loaded with them.  One shop manager was removing reference books from the shelves when I went in and she said they have difficulty shifting books and reference the most.

I looked up the values of some of the catalogues but none of them are worth much,  nowhere near what I thought they might be and anyway it is not about making money, and there is really no rarity in any of them.  They are not out of print and quite frankly nobody really wants them.  However, I persevered with local exit points like the church book stall for those books not containing obscenities, and the village as well as the charity shops. 

My taste in art has changed of late too and I do not feel drawn to contemporary art as I did when I was studying art 30 years ago so it is not the horror that I thought it might  be parting with my books.

I do still have a small collection of poetry books that I acquired last year when doing my Masters.  I am not quite ready to part with them yet but I am sure I can do so quite easily when the time comes.  The internet means I am never without a source of reference in any case.

When I see the empty shelves I feel happy about a job well done and another load off my mind.