on books

[anotheranon]

It's going to be another 6-8 weeks before our bookcases arrive. As such I'm sitting here with the twitchy need to look something up, and being unable to, because all of the books are still boxed.

D. and I had a hard time purging the collection of volumes we still like but were in tatters because in our minds books are sacred (albeit in a secular way). It just seems viscerally wrong to destroy a book, even if it's an ancient rotting copy of the "19XX Consumer Guide to [$outdated product]". The information was useful or the story inspiring enough at one point that someone saw fit to put it to paper and print it, so to destroy that information feels like snuffing an idea.

Relatedly I recently received The Book Nobody Read. My sister recommended it to me as a thrilling (intellectually) tale of bibliographic detective work: the 20+ years one man spent tracking down every surviving copy of Copernicus' De revolutionibus, the groundbreaking work on astronomy that a prominent modern astronomer still insisted that "nobody ever read". In the process he discovers copies no only clearly read but also annotated by the likes of Galileo and Kepler and many more that someone felt were valuable enough to save for 500 years, whether it was read or not. Even if no one HAD bothered to read it at least Copernicus' ideas survived his death. What if he'd never written them down, or shared them at all?

At the end, donation was clearly the way to go. Friends of the Library will make sure the ideas we no longer want are still available to someone, and have the stoutheartedness to throw out what really can't be salvaged. After all, we're creating a personal library, but not an archive.

Comments

[jlsjlsjls.livejournal.com]

If it makes you feel better, even libraries end up outright tossing books ... heck, what else can you do with stuff pulled from the collections for tatteredness or lack of use, when not even the reading public will buy it for a few cents OR take it as a giveaway? Professional term is "weeding" (literally removing the non-useful titles so that there's room for the good stuff to accumulate, thrive and be used). At least these days there's the comfort knowing that paper recycling means what is tossed can be reborn as new useful information or entertainment.

P.S. Consumer Guides past are definitely archived in multiple somewheres (and most probably digitized as well) as technological history. Which would amaze the original publishers who intended them to be ephemeral. ;-)

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know libraries have to weed. I figure they know what's tossable better than I do, and lack the sentimentality that makes me hang onto things far longer than needed :P

I'm glad to know someone is archiving consumer guides and the like. I just have to remember that so I won't be tempted to save them myself - not my job!

[jlsjlsjls.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately I've seen some pretty horrifying "guidelines" for weeding at various libraries ... ideally it's supposed to be by use and content (some things may not circulate much, but they're core info), but I've also come across purely by publication year regardless of actual popularity/use and, even worse, a librarian's personal preferences (which is a huge no-no ... one of the earliest things I learned in library school was that it is essential to be able to set aside one's own tastes and opinions when building/cataloguing/weeding a collection. Otherwise I'd be classifying 95% of self-help and get-rich books as fiction ...)