We’re Drowning in Old Books. But Getting Rid of Them Is Heartbreaking.
12th March 2023
On a recent weekday afternoon, Bruce Albright arrives in the Wonder Book parking lot, pops the trunk of his Camry and unloads two boxes of well-worn books. “It’s sad. Some of these I’ve read numerous times,” he says.
Albright, 70, has been at this for six months, shedding 750 books at his local library and at this Frederick, Md., store. The rub: More than 1,700 volumes remain shelved in the retired government lawyer’s nearby home, his collection lovingly amassed over a half-century.
Piker. My wife and I have over 4,000 books, down from the 6,000 we had when we got married and consolidated our collections. “We can’t ever get divorced,” she said, “It would be impossible to sort out whose books are whose.”
This, of course, doesn’t include the thousands of books we have on Kindle, nor the thousands of books I have scanned into PDFs over the course of the last twenty years.
If we have books we no longer “need”, we donate them to our local public library. They have periodic sales of such donated books; the library gets additional funding, and the books are priced low enough that people who don’t have the money to spring for a Kindle or tablet get something they can afford to read (and perhaps treasure).
What goes around comes around.