When we got oversupplied with books, it was clearly time to get rid of some. Give them to family and friends, give to local libraries who might decide to add them to the collection or sell them to raise a little money.
Thinking of no longer having a particular book on my shelf to look at can be painful. So, I asked myself why? I checked the book and my feelings out a little bit. I no longer have a copy of the CRC book of statistical tables. I never actually used it very much but it was a marker for my being in graduate school. We had to get rid of some books unless we were going to start storing them in rented external storage lockers. That seemed silly.
Naturally, I asked myself what I remembered from the book's content, trying to decide if keeping it was important. When I think of most texts, I find parts of no interest or parts I object to, know to be out-of-date or irrelevant or wrong. Looking at the books on our shelves, I realize that our King James Bible is one of our oldest books. I have read the chapter of Ecclesiastes many times. However, I can't recite it by heart. If you read me a line, I can't tell you the next line. I can't even do that with the book called "Grading, Testing and Instructional Format", which I wrote myself.
I considered tearing out pages or photocopying just the parts I think I want to remember. Maybe I should make a video of books on the shelf. If I watched the video every now and then, I could recall what the presence of the volume means to me, where I read the book, what use I have put the contents to and things like that. However, I almost certainly would not watch the video. I have too many books I want to read to bother spending time that way.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
