The Great Book Purge
Posted By Ric Vatner on August 24, 2009
I love the Internet. But that hasn’t diminished my love affair with books. I have seven bookcases at work and twelve at home plus numerous books lying on tables, next to my bed, in rooms around the house and a few in boxes (okay, quite a few in boxes). My Amazon wish list just gets longer no matter how many books I buy and walking to work last weekend I bought ten more at a lovely coffee shop in Paddington that makes a great coffee and sells second hand books.
My library has outgrown me
Recently I had to face the fact that I have many more book buying years ahead of me but somewhat less shelf space. So for the first time in fifteen years I took every book off the shelves and sorted them by category and (more importantly) by which to keep and which to move on. The nineteen bookshelves, assorted tables and boxes are whats left.
And the Losers Were….
I gave away approximately 300 books, it was probably more but it broke my heart to count them. It was like telling an old friend they are no longer valued. Many were computer books going back to dos (there was even a couple on CPM and if you know what that is, stop bye one day and we can have a chat about the old days).
A large percentage of the rest were novels or reference books and though I am ashamed to admit it, quite a few were chosen because I didn’t like the cover. One of my pet hates are those generic penguin covers, with the bright orange red strip across the top and bottom and a white face in the middle across which the title is stamped in a font that was designed for public service announcements.
How many ordinary books have sold well because they had an extraordinary cover I wonder? But as if to prove that you can’t judge a book by its cover; recently I wanted to buy a copy of Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton for my brother and the only version available at my local Borders was just such a book, which only served to remind me just how frivolous my selection process was.
The last group to go were books that I deemed to be less relevant today including a large selection I bought in the 90’s on the rise and rise of Japan, Why Japan is dominating the world in business and manufacturing. That was when I was introduced to Deming who I used to think was a god on a par with Drucker, whose books I kept.
My Library - My Socialogical View of the World
Looking at my library and the books I bought at different periods of my life was like looking at one of those chronological tables of history for the last 50 years. For example, when Japan was a rising economic super power I wanted to know what made it tick. When IBM, Ford and GM were becoming the poster boys for globalisation I wanted to know why and when they failed, ditto. I have quite a few books on economics and particularly the crash of 1929 and the great depression. Bye the way, I decided to read them again instead of buying more on the same topic AKA the recent financial crisis.
My history collection is the same. Apart from my collection on ancient history which remains 100% in tact there was a large selection of books on World War 1 and 2 (now pruned), the cold war and the debate for and against the creation of a unified Europe (argument over) and whether Britain should join it (debate ongoing), Vietnam featured while the Korean war didn’t and I had quite a collection on the rise and fall of communism and the economies of Eastern Europe (pruned, in more ways than one). Lately I have added books about the Middle East and of course the development of China and to a lesser degree India as up and coming economic world powers.
To build up the numbers I gave away all of the children’s books I had held on to for sentimental reasons. These days kids only read text books and recent novels everything else they get on the Internet. I also gave away my books on parenting and child psychology; to be honest I was too busy to read them when the kids were growing up. I hope the people who took them plan to read them before they need them as I planned to do. Well you know what they say about plans!
I have to say that parting with my old friends was the most traumatic thing that has happened to me in years. In a perfect world I would have kept them all and between you and me, I miss them. But on the plus side my library is newly catalogued, sorted and filed by category and I know what I own and what I have not read recently or at all. Better still, my appetite for reading is revitalised and I am reading more voraciously than ever.
I pride myself on having an eclectic collection. I can find at least two books on just about any topic that takes my fancy, often more. But I discovered some gaping holes during the purge especially in the Western Philosophy section. That will give me more reasons than I ever needed to regularly visit the eccentric Paddington café bookstore and some of the other quite social and really friendly bookshops dotted along Oxford Street as I take my weekend perambulations. I love to multi-task don’t you?
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