By the time I moved out of my childhood home to go to university a few years back, things were getting rather out of hand within the four walls that had served as my bedroom for the previous 8 years. There were High School Musical posters that I couldn’t be bothered removing, because however little Zac Efron now interested me, the walls looked worse underneath. There were were trinkets from childhood holidays littering the table and floor: fans that didn’t open, cracked bells and paper weights that had never had any paper to weigh down. Most importantly, in this room were all of the books that I had ever owned.
When I returned for the holidays from university (those blissful breaks where you suddenly remember how wonderful it was to open the fridge and find more than milk and last night’s takeaway) the full force of how cluttered my room had become would hit me hard. I began blitzing it little by little every time I returned.
First went the posters. Zac, you served me well, but truth be told, I just never fancied you that much. Next, the holiday trinkets, because we were lying to ourselves even when we first bought them that they weren’t junk. The books, however, posed a problem, because it wasn’t like I could just put them in the bin, right?
…Right?
After thinking about it, I decided to steel myself and just do it. I didn’t need most of those books and I would likely never read them again. Childhood stories I didn’t even remember were taking up rather a lot the space, space that it was perhaps time to be cleared to make room for ‘literature’- you know, now that I was now a grown up and all.
So I went downstairs, grabbed the recycling box and began throwing in all the books that I no longer wanted.
I must clarify at this point that this was no arbitrary cull. I looked at each and every book in order to think back to what it was about and whether I had enjoyed it. There were some that it was utterly out of the question to throw away. Chris Riddell and Paul Stewart’s The Edge Chronicles simply had to stay, Harry Potter remains my lifelong ally and there were others, such as Sylvia Waugh’s The Mennyms series that I just couldn’t separate from the fond memory of my dad perched at the side of my bed reading to me as I contentedly breathed into my pillow. These books, among several others, will forever remain in my book collection.
Then there was also a small pile for the books that I remembered being good, but that I didn’t feel especially attached to. These went into the charity shop pile; these were the books that I felt glad at the idea of somebody else reading.
Picking up a book that I didn’t even remember reading, however, I told myself that if it had been so underwhelming that I couldn’t even remember the plot (and this was after reading the blurb, mind you) it had clearly not been a good read. And these books were thrown into the recycling box with minimal guilt.
The way I saw it, the books and their authors that had earned my love and respect would remain. Those that had not would be recycled so that their pages could then at least be reused to host more worthy words.
After all, trees are not an unlimited resource and there is a lot of bad literature around.
I lugged the recycling box downstairs, filled to the brim with the books of my past that had failed to impress me and ran into my dad, who looked at the box, alarmed. He was wrestling with Book Thrower’s Guilt, I could tell. But I made my case and, in the interest of clearing out the house (every room of which looked rather a lot like my bedroom at that time) he agreed to take the book boxes to the tip.
Why is it that we need to assuage the uncomfortable feeling that disposing of a book is simply wrong? A shameful action, an insult to our only partially-educated planet. Charity shops are filled to the brim with second hand books that people do not buy. Children’s literature is expanding hugely into the digital sphere in a way that adult literature is not. And yet at the prospect of throwing out a second-rate kid’s book, we balk.
At any rate, when my father arrived at the tip, the staff there took one look at the book boxes and told him firmly that books were not to be recycled. There was a specific area for them at the tip. They took the boxes and left, my father secretly relieved that my literary victims had been spared.
I still do not believe that the foundation for Book Thrower’s Guilt is as strong as it once was. If you disagree, please tell me otherwise before before any more books suffer the consequences of my ignorance!
I got over my guilt at recycling books back during a period of my life when I moved four times in six years. Now I’m just grateful for ebooks, ensuring that I’ll never have to pack endless boxes of books again!
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I love my kindle too, but there’s an unavoidable air of practicality to ebooks, don’t you think? And simultaneously something undeniably romantic about a paper edition… but a rubbish paper edition still doesn’t deserve space on anyone’s bookshelf!!
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Interesting. I too have struggled with recycling books rather than donating them to the thrift store. And, you make a good point about trees and limited resources. Still, I usually end up donating unless the book is ripped, penned up, coffee-marked, or in some other abused state. I wonder what the thrift stores do with all those unread, unwanted books?
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Well, either they a) bite the bullet and finally recycle them or b) try and guiltily offload them to another charity :’) I suspect the latter!
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I totally struggle with this! I have a hard time getting rid of books in the first place. I will clean out my shelves, box books I really didn’t like or ones I care nothing for, plan to take them to the library to donate, and then spend the next few months not doing so. When it comes to throwing away books, I have a couple of boxes in my closet of old books (like reference books, dictionaries, book of quotes) that I very much doubt anyone is going to want, so they just sit in there, collecting dust. I know I need to get rid of them, but the thought of putting them in the recycling bin makes me feel like a bad bookworm. I want to overcome this, I need to overcome this because at some point I will have no choice because my closet will be full of books I want nothing to do with.
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It’s all in the mind!! Be strong and throw them out!! :’) (Or not, your choice) It’s such a shame that we all hit this snag when it comes with such a satisfying job: organising the bookshelf!
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Yes, I am determined to do so.
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Up until I retired 10 months ago (from a library) I had a personal library of almost 5000 books. Now I have only about 3000 hardcovers. It is very difficult to get rid of books you’ve spent years to acquire. I would never throw them in the garbage. Some I donated to my book club as giveaways. Others I donated to a local thrift store. It was emotionally wrenching, but it felt good to purge as well. Now I find myself reading almost exclusively on my Kindle. I read 2-3 titles per week.
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