Downsizing

On September 5, 2006, in Culture, by peterb

I’ve written about my need to get rid of books before. Tonight I made another pass, and achieved my short-term goal: I’ve taken enough books off of my shelves to free up one entire bookshelf. Which means I can move that bookshelf out of the room it is in.

The amazing thing to me is that even after I’ve made several passes, I still find enough chaff to bury an ox. Four copies of Homer’s Odyssey. Four! Two copies of Black’s Law Dictionary. One copy of James Gleick’s Faster, which I ironically never found time to read.

The books I am going to give away fall into two categories: books I’ve read and have no intention of reading again, or books that, despite my honest intention to read, have sat on my shelves unread for 10 years.

Here’s a quick inventory I took (I apologize for the tragic format). If you want a book, let me know and it’s yours for the current Amazon value (meaning “whatever Delicious Library tells me the going rate for a used copy is”) less a buck, plus postage. Everything else gets sent to paperbackswap or the local library.

Most of the books are in good condition. “The Illustrated Longitude” has a torn slipcover, so that’s half-price. If you see something you want, drop a line to tleavesweblog – a t – gmail dot com.

 

4 Responses to “Downsizing”

  1. psu says:

    Hey! I also will never read SOLARIS. Cool!

  2. Duncan says:

    You have a few there that look interesting to me. I should probably go through my book collection though, it’s been a year since I moved and they still haven’t all made it out of boxes.

  3. Nat says:

    It’s probably the super-nice Delicious Library — http://www.delicious-monster.com/

    It’ll do barcode scanning using an attached video camera and then look up the ISBN results on Amazon, which makes it very very handy for book cataloging.

  4. I can’t get rid of books. Just can’t. We have thousands of them, too. But I can’t take in more either. Three or four new ones arrive every month.

    However, may I ask which database program that is in the screenshot?