Pruning the Leaves

Sometimes if you really love something, you have to let it go — especially when you can’t walk through the basement without tripping over it anymore.

Ann and I have been culling our large collection of books, keeping only titles that meet one of these three criteria:

1. We expect to reread it ourselves
2. We regard this particular copy as irreplaceable (because of market or sentimental value)
3. We would loan it out to others

Even with such relatively loose criteria, we are weeding out close to 700 volumes. There are some truly great books in this pile, but if all goes as planned, we won’t miss them much. (Soon I’ll post a list of the titles we’re ditching, since some of you have asked.)

These 35+ bags of books are going to a charitable organization called “Books4Cause”:http://books4cause.com, which is (in their own words) “a self-sustaining, for-profit social venture whose mission is to capitalize on the value of the book to fund literacy initiatives locally, nationally and around the world.” And don’t worry, we still have plenty of books left! We figure we have around 1,500 volumes left.

Here’s what it looked like as I went through one corner of our basement “stacks,” first pulling titles to be given away, then filling the shelves back up with titles consolidated from other shelves. This video runs at 20x true speed.

“Inter folia fructus, non multa sed bona.” That is, among leaves there is fruit, and it’s not a matter of quantity but quality.