Clearing Out Books

Clearning Out Books marissabaker.wordpress.com
one of my bookshelves, complete with a dusty dinosaur

Our local library system has a book sale once a month, where they sell books, CDs, and other items pulled from the library collection or donated to the Friends of the Library. When I was there last Thursday, the room normally filled with VHS tapes and a couple DVDs had been taken over by history books. Not only that, but the shelves regularly allotted to history books were full, as was a shelf near the front of the building for new 900s books. It was as if they had gutted their history collection.

I managed to restrain myself and only brought home a few Medieval books that will be useful for research, but even through they are sitting on the floor for lack of shelf space I don’t feel good about that decision. I wish I could have given more of them a home. I’m not a bibliophile who refuses to destroy an old moldy paperback because it deserves respect as a book, but I don’t like to see perfectly good history books sitting unwanted on the shelves.

At least our library can sell them. Other libraries are chucking books in the trash when they pull them off the shelves. Not just the old moldy books either, these include new hardcovers. It makes me sad, and I want to bring them home and give them a nice comfortable spot on my shelves. The irony is, to make room for all these books I want to “rescue,” I’ll have to get rid of some books currently in my home library. Maybe I’ll donate them to the library book sale.

3 thoughts on “Clearing Out Books

  • Government wastefulness. Is this a new thing?

    I rescued an entire hardback set of Nancy Drew from a library give-away once. I didn’t want ’em, but since I’d grown up on them, I hated to see them chucked out with the trash. Later, I found someone whose collection was destroyed by water damage and mailed them to her. No more storing them for me, and she got a replacement set. Everyone was happy. 🙂

    Like

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