The Shelf Dilemma

I once read a profile of a famous author (it may have been Stephen King, but my memory for things like this doesn't so much fail me as sit in a corner of my brain and mock me mercilessly) who, when the house next door to theirs went on the market, purchased it and had every room filled with shelves, converting the entire structure into a personal library.  I seem to remember they also had a tunnel built between the two houses, permitting access to the library at all times and in all weather, but I might have imagined that part.

In any case, this arrangement immediately became a life goal of mine.  Unfortunately, none of my neighbors have shown an inclination to move lately.  Still more unfortunately, my writing income doesn't quite measure up to King's, so unless this hypothetical neighbor sets an asking price with the decimal point accidentally moved several spaces to the left, practical obstacles abound.

A small part of my Rex Stout shelf

I bring this up because this particular column isn't giving advice or examining the writing process.  Instead, it's asking a question that has haunted my entire life: what do I do with all these books?

What do you do with yours?

I've always had something of an accumulative, pack rat mentality.  I find it very, very difficult to get rid of any object that has any kind of personal association for me.  I have tourist maps from pretty much every trip I've ever taken in my life.  I have a box filled with notes passed in high school classes, many now completely illegible and none having any specific significance I can recall.  I have a closet shelf stuffed full of free tote bags from a variety of conventions and promotional events.  I will never, under any conceivable circumstance, need to tote that much stuff, but what am I supposed to do?  Just get rid of fifty cents worth of canvas bearing the logo of an organization I no longer belong to or a comic book company that hasn't existed in decades?

When I think about getting rid of stuff like this, a corner of my brain starts poking me with either "but you spent money on that" or "you might want it someday" or, on many occasions, both.

The real problem, as you've probably guessed, is books.  There have been a few times, in the last half century, when I've had more shelf space than books to fill them.  Those times can usually be measured in weeks, if not days.  It's the eternal conundrum: no matter how many shelves I add, the books outrun them.

This has been going on, essentially, for my entire life.  As a kid, my allowance money was almost always spent at Waldenbooks or B. Dalton (look it up, youngsters).  Once I started working as a teenager, I haunted the used book stores in my town, always thrilled to find a Rex Stout or John D. MacDonald I didn't already have.  And yes, I also patronized the library, and I love and honor libraries and librarians to this day.  I just never liked the part where you have to give the books back.

This much of the story probably sounds familiar to most writers.  Most of us, after all, start out as avid readers.  But somehow, most other folks don't seem to have my issues with letting things go, or at least not to this degree.  Adding shelves to try to keep up with myself has been a constant theme of my life.  My father built several sets for me in the basement, when I lived at home.  In graduate school I found myself often going to WalMart to pick up yet another set of cheap particle-board shelves to cram into some corner of my tiny apartment.  

In the house where I live now, there's a small room in the basement designated, on the original blueprints, as a wine cellar.  I lined it floor-to-ceiling with shelves.  That worked for a little while, but it's now overflowing again, with books on the floor and lying on their sides in front of the shelved volumes.  There are books stacked on nightstands and coffee tables, books in drawers, books filling an odd space under a desk, cardboard boxes of books in the storage room.

Just between you and me, I'm starting to think I might have a problem.  Not only does the overflow become unsightly, but it's very difficult to put my hands on any specific book, even if I can remember what room it's (supposed to be) in.

It's really a twofold dilemma.  First, there's that "you might want it someday" part of my brain, which becomes particularly energetic on the subject of books.  The emotional toll involved in parting with any book means that even if I can bring myself to do it, the process takes a considerable amount of time.  I wish I could just zip down each shelf, quickly sorting everything into "keep" and "don't keep" piles, but I apparently have to hold each book, read the jacket, and stare into space moodily for a while before making a call--which, all too often, is "keep."

The second part of the problem is that it's not as easy to get rid of books as it used to be.  When I moved to the the town where I live, it had at least five good used book stores.  Now there's one, which is clinging to life, but which understandably is very, very choosy about acquiring new stock.  Selling things one at a time on ebay is too demanding of time and labor.  I can donate books to the local library or Goodwill, but even they tend to get a little grouchy when you show up with too many at once.  Granted, this isn't as big a problem as when I was trying to find someone to take a few hundred old VHS tapes, but it's an issue.

Yes, I have a copy of this

What I really need is a system that would allow me to make quick decisions about each book.  I need a certain, limited set of categories of books I'm allowed to keep, which would turn the books from an undifferentiated mass into a curated collection.  Some categories are obvious.  I have a pretty sizable collection of Harlan Ellison books, many signed and/or small press limited editions that are not easy to come by.  Keep.  Anthologies I have stories in?  Keep.  I want to hold onto most short story collections, because they often have smaller publication runs and go out of print faster than novels.  I want to keep the battered old book club editions of the writers who got me into this genre--Ed McBain, Sue Grafton, Lawrence Block, maybe a dozen favorites all told.

But there are so many marginal cases.  I did my dissertation on novels by Paul Auster and Don DeLillo.  My reading tastes have shifted such that I rarely pick them up, but do I really want to cull so many books with my annotations in the margins?  How about this battered paperback copy of the George Burns autobiography The Third Time Around, which I probably read a dozen times as a kid (I was a weird kid)?  It's long out of print, and there are no audio or Kindle editions.  Why, I wouldn't be able to replace it!  What about this stack of true crime books?  What if I want to write a story inspired by one of them someday?

So: am I alone in having this problem?  And for those of you who are avid readers but who don't have this problem, how do you do it?  What's your secret?  Where do your books go?

Next month I'll be back to writing issues, I promise.  Right now--I need help!