BOOKS
I have a stuff problem. I have a huge amount of stuff, as most Americans do, but I am 87 and there is an open door to the great beyond down the road and I can’t take the stuff with me.
A good part of my stuff problem is a book problem. All my life I have collected books. I wanted to hold on to the books that I have read in order to look at them again. And I collected a large number of books that I would like to read.
The obvious problem is that there is no where to put these books. This was obvious 30 years ago. As I collected more books than I had shelf space for these books went into boxes to be stored in my carport, or crazier still, in the storage area I have paid for monthly for twenty years. Once a book went into a box it meant that I would never see it again.
The reason for this nuttiness was that I kept running across books selling for a dollar or two that I really wanted to read. But collecting them at the rate of one or two a week, I, of course, couldn’t find time to read them. And then, to make matters worse, for a long period of time, maybe twenty years, I spent my time writing and didn’t have time to read any books, while continuing to collect books that I wanted to read someday.
Of course, the reasonable answer to this was not to buy books at all. I could have kept a list of the books I wanted to read and then gotten them out of the public library. I used to think libraries were for people who didn’t have books, a way to access almost any book they wanted to read. That way many people could enjoy the same book at no cost. But now it finally dawns on me that libraries are the place for people who don’t have room to store books. The library will store a book, many people can read it, and I can always take it out of the library when I want to read it or reread it.
The problem now is that libraries themselves are running out of space for books. I have many books that I would like to give to the library including many books of photographs. But libraries, themselves, are running out of space and turning to digital books.
Finally in the last five years I have only bought ebooks. I can have as many ebooks on Kindle as I want without having to store them. In fact, I realize, the books are kept on a cloud in a kind of giant library and anyone can pay a fee to sign them out again and again or other people can sign them out. I have over 1000 ebooks now. When I die they will vanish. No problem.
I wish I had seen this coming, but the world is changing at such a rapid rate that few of us see anything coming. Paper books were here from the time of Gutenberg and now they are vanishing. I am caught in the past.
My job right now is to sort through my books and presumably to keep the books that I want. But I realize that sorting through my huge number of books is pointless. If I pick out the two hundred that I think I will want to read in the future where am I going to store them? I have no room now and if I downsize, which I will soon have to do, I will have even less. So there is no point in sorting them. The one thing I could do is to make a list of the 200 books I want think I might want to read and when I want to read one get it out of the library, or because the libraries are cutting back themselves and probably don’t have room for the books I think I want to read, the best thing for me is to buy a book on my list on line at Bookbuob for a dollar or two.
But realistically because I will probably never get to these 200 books I should simply skip sorting and just get rid of every book I have without fretting about whether I want to part with them or not.
And who will even want to take them. I read an article lately that bemoans the fact that many children don’t even own one book and has a plan for getting books to children. They are welcome to my books but there is not a way to pass them along that I am aware of. There are second hand book stores that I could give my books to, but they have limited space and won’t take many. Why should anyone buy my books or even take them free? No one has space.
Book burning is not in favor among liberals, but it looks like book burning or book burial (they are biodegradable) is the only way out.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 