Clearing the Books

I own something on the order of five hundred books, maybe more. A few years ago, I spent a day or two cataloguing all of them. That list is woefully out of date, so at the moment I'm trying to go through a bunch of the books that I've taken from one place to another in my travels throughout America and the world, as many of these are absent from that master list. The ultimate goal of this effort is to produce a list that I can go through in order to decide what gets saved, and what gets culled.

My travels in the Middle East and Europe drove home the fact that I (and to a greater extent, we as Americans and Westerners) accumulate way too much stuff. For many years, I had a sort of pathological obsession with collecting books. My Kindle, other priorities for my budget, limited storage space, and the repeated exercise of having to move them from place to place has eased that obsession quite a bit. So, I'd like to get rid of a lot of the books that I've collected over the years - even some that I thought I'd probably keep forever, like the copies of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings that I read in college and intended that my kids would eventually read, but could probably be replaced with different copies later, or (as my friend The Bestie notes) even as E-books.

The first step is to get a definitive list. Then, I'll identify what I want to keep, and what I want to unload. After that, I'll figure out what I may be able to get money for, arrange to donate the stuff I can't sell, and go around to various used book shops in the area to try and unload the rest. I can think of about four used book shops in the area that I can bounce between, which could help me to recoup some of the expenses for books that I've accumulated over the years. I'll take a proverbial bath on them, which is a long-term lesson to be sure. Maybe one of these days, I'll be settled for long enough to put up three or four bookcases around a desk to make a sort of home office. In the mean time, with that many books, I have my work cut out for me.