Cull the herd.

I know the time has come to get rid of some books. 

I've talked about this before, maybe on this blog, but I've done nothing about it. In my heart of hearts, I do not want to. As a boy and as an apartment-dwelling young man, I dreamed of one day having a home with a dedicated library. You know -- all wood and leather and comfortable chairs and reading lamps and peace and quiet and books as far as the eye could see. I didn't care what the rest of the house looked like. I never got that far.

None of that worked out -- we have two rooms with large bookcases and a desk with bookshelves and a small shelf downstairs with cookbooks and home books and stacks of books around and a box of books in the cellar that I had stored in my in-laws' cellar and had to retrieve when they passed on. 

And random piles.

Thank God I don't live in an earthquake zone, because I am sure I'd be buried in them one day. People would say "He died doing what he loved" and my wife would say "What, gasping for air under half a ton of old paperbacks?"

If I'm to avoid that fate, I figure I should sort the books first into sets:

1) Books I need to have about me and would take into the grave with me for the afterlife like a Pharaoh

2) Books I treasure 

3) Books I like and would like to read again

4) Books I think I liked and pretend that one day I will give them another shot

5) Books I read but didn't like and won't read again

6) Books I bought new but will never read

7) Books I bought used but will never read

Seems like a pretty easy go from there, right? Just eliminate piles four through seven and I'm done! 

But of course it's never that easy. Deep inside I hate to get rid of books. Worse, no one wants them. I have perhaps three or four valuable enough to sell online, but people don't collect books anymore -- not like they collect really valuable things, like Star Wars figurines. The library doesn't want them -- they certainly don't want paperbacks, although I might convince them to take a stack of new hardcovers that I bought in a moment of madness and now regret. Stores that sell used books, once thick on the ground in any city, are now barely extant. Recycling is the fate of these books, and it'd be sad even if I had not spent actual money on them. 

Well, if I don't do it, one day my wife will be stuck with the job, and that's a sad thought. (Women tend to outlive men by about seven years.) Looks like my dream library remains as far-off as thoughts of being interred in a book-lined pyramid. But I can dream, can't I? Call me Nectanebook, last of the book-obsessed mummies.