Books for sale . . . or not

While cleaning out my closet in preparation for this move, I came across a box of books I had shoved in the back corner. I had no shelf room for these books, so they stayed in the box in which they travelled from Virginia. Now here they are in a corner of my room, waiting for their fate to be decided.

I know the rule about “if you haven’t used it or loved it in a year (or two or three), get rid of it.” I haven’t looked into most of these books since about 1995, although I used to have shelf space for them and enjoyed looking at their covers.


Among the authors: Kant, Spinoza, Descartes, Cassirer’s History of the Enlightenment, Freud’s Introductory Lectures, Nietzche, Heidegger, Emanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt. Just typing those names makes me feel elevated. I kept them thinking, “Someday I might reread these. Or my kids might want to read them.”


But I won’t. And they probably won’t either. Well, they might page through the Freud looking for the dirty parts that don’t exist in these lectures.

Honestly, I can’t even remember what’s inside these books. When I open the cover, I see the notes I made, but I don’t remember the relevance of the lines I underlined. I don’t even remember the distinctions between the different philosophers. I readily acknowledge that I am never going to go back and reread Kierkegard or Kant.


So why can’t I give these books away? When my sister-in-law was here, I offered her some of my books. She picked up Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Wait, I really liked that book, back in 1991, when I read it last. I might need it. How about if you just borrow it? Take some of my philosophy texts? NOooooooo. How about some worn out children’s clothes instead? But wait, I might want to treasure that little baby girl dress a little longer. . .

If I keep these books, will I be retaining a bit of the college student I once was? Will I maintain a certain elan if I have these books on my shelf? The problem is not only that I don’t have enough shelves, but that that student is long gone. Why is it so hard to let go? Stripping away the accretions of the last few years is more painful than plucking eyebrows. This stuff represents a certain identity I don’t have anymore. And the possibility of an academic identity that I will never achieve. I need to make a clean break. Detachment, detachment! one side of my mind keeps chanting. The other side whines, but I love this!


To give my mind a rest, I started reading a couple library books, the last books I’m going to check out. Not a help in my determination to get rid of the equivalent of one box of books. After reading the refreshing Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books by Paul Collins, I felt reassured that having 2 or 3 thousand books is an admirable goal, unreadable though they may be. Collins moves that many or more across the ocean, and then picks up a few more while in England. He writes about all these remaindered and discarded books rotting away in the little English town of Hay-on-Wye, which is apparently the used book capital of the world. He and his wife go there to live, but they can’t find a house they can afford to maintain on their writer incomes. They wistfully look at old, abandoned homes, abandoned books, abandoned churches and graveyards.  The ruins of the past are quickly being paved over to make room for new developments, despite the tenacity that the residents of Hay exhibit in preserving old books.

Collins' book itself is probably doomed to be remaindered, as Collins acknowledges. It’s an interesting little memoir of a quirky place and its people and the books that have come to rest there, many to be reduced to ashes. It has some great quotes from obscure authors. For example, from a letter to Emily Dickinson from her friend Helen Hunt Jackson, who wrote a fictionalized biography of Dickinson: “When you are what men call dead, you will be sorry you were so stingy.” That bites a bit.


Collins celebrates the serendipity of coming across a brilliant but forgotten bit of writing in the stacks and piles of antiquarian bookstores. He seems especially interested in bits that reveal the eccentric history of science and medicine. But he also is interested in preserving bits of humanity, which I suppose is what all books are about. When he goes to visit his dying British grandmother, he notices a resemblance between his ancestor and his son:

“Something is being saved here: a certain shape of the earlobe, a peculiarly elfin expression during sleep. These come from my grandmother’s side of the family. Her grandmother left them to her when she died, as did her grandmother, going back generations into Gaul and Wales and back up to whatever godforsaken steppe or glacier my ancestors crawled away from. We have saved these tokens of humanity. Are they worth saving? Do they mean anything? Maybe not. They just are. But I wonder – perhaps the sight of family, the family look, is some consolation to my grandmother. Like every generation before her, she has passed some faint trace of herself along.”

Collins’ book is something of himself for his son. And if my children ever read the books I read, they’ll have something of me. A communal knowledge, as it were. But do I want to saddle my kids with a bunch of stuff they don’t want? Collins’ book wouldn’t be one I would pass on; if I had bought this book instead of borrowing it, I don’t think I would have too much trouble putting it in the discard pile after reading because one reading consumes what it has to give. Although it does give leads to books to keep an eye out for. I particularly like this quote from a favorite book of Collins’, Recreations of a Country Parson, which was published anonymously in 1861, but written by Andrew Boyd, a parson’s son. Collins reads this book to fall asleep because it is calming. On reading books about beautiful homes, Boyd writes,

“Therein lies the salt of such of book. The enjoyment of all things beyond eating and drinking arises out of our idealizing them. Do you think a child who will spend an hour delightedly in galloping round the garden on his horse, which is a stick, regards that stick as a mere bit of wood? No: that stick is to him instinct with imaginings of a pony pattering feet and shaggy man, and erect little ears. It is not so long since the writer was accustomed to ride on horseback in that inexpensive fashion, but what he can remember all that the stick was; and remember too how sometimes fancy would flag, the idealizing power break down, and from being a horse the stick became merely a stick, a dull, wearisome, stupid thing. And of what little things imagination, thus elevating and enchanting them, can make how much!"

Then again, maybe “Sixpence House” would be worth rereading . . . good thing it has to go back to the library, so I don’t have to decide whether it stays or goes.