On Moving Books

We’re having our family room painted next week. That means a lot of things have to be moved out of the room or at least away from the walls. That includes book cases. We have four book cases and between them they hold several thousand books. At least 2,000 based on my best guesstimate. That’s a lot of books to move. Right now they are all stacked up in an unused bedroom until the job is done.

There are a couple of, lets just call them issues, with moving  books. Sure there is the obvious that they are heavy and that it takes a lot of trips to move them. Then there is the issue that they collect some dust which is now doing wonders for my sinuses and allergies. But a bigger issue is that, surprise, I like books. That means that it is hard to avoid looking though them as I pile them up. That slows the process down and I think as we put them back next week I will be holding some out to re-read.

I’ve also looked though a couple of old scrap books. Would you believe that Mrs T and I once saw a Broadway play, Godspell no less,  for $8.50 a ticket? You can’t get in for less than ten times that today. Oh and 30 years ago Mrs T and I had less weight and a lot more hair. And wow did she look great! Well still does to me but when I look at those pictures I wonder how I ever managed to date her at all. But I digress.

The plan is to thin the collection a bit after the painting job. That will be an interesting process as neither of us has ever been good at getting grid of books. But really there are some books we are unlikely to ever read again and we need space for the new books we keep buying. Putting up still more shelves is not an option as there is only so much wall space in the house. 🙂

One Response to “On Moving Books”

  1. Matt says:

    We’re having our whole house painted, and I’ve recently(ish) moved out of college, and Kyle and I were maybe the only people on campus that had a (full) bookcase in our room. So I can definitely empathize with you.

    What I find is that I’ll pick out a book and think, “I remember this!” and start thumbing through it, or I think, “I never did get to reading this one… I should!”

    (My other problem is that, being somewhat obsessive-compulsive, I start thinking about how I should really start a database of all the books, indexed by ISBN, so that I can pull data in from external sources, search half.com for their value, etc. At one point I started looking at barcode scanners online.)

    As far as getting rid of books… I’ve found that the values on half.com can be surprising. That really rare book is probably worth $0.99, but that book you were going to toss because it’s horrible might be worth a fortune. It’s definitely worth plugging the ISBN of your discard pile in… Although they don’t always sell right away. (I assume, given the way I know Mrs. T., that I needn’t bother pointing out that libraries might be glad to have some of them… I was looking at picking up some new books a while ago, and noticed that my library had none of them… I thought I’d get ’em on half.com, read ’em, and then donate ’em.)

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