What to do with too many books?

A while ago, my wife and I had some work done on our house, which entailed packing up a half-dozen bookcases until the work was done. We took the opportunity to sift through our books and to decide what we no longer needed. Deciding what to keep and what to let go of was a delicate negotiation. But equally tricky was deciding what to do with books we no longer needed. 

As we thought through the winnowing process, we reached a handful of conclusions.

1. Don’t just try to dump all your unneeded books to your local public or university library. You are likely to be disappointed. Libraries don’t need your old textbooks, reference books, and popular fiction. If the books are important, the library may already have them or have a later edition. And remember, it costs libraries money to process circulating books, so they may actually lose money by putting your donations on the shelf. Some libraries will even encourage you to make a monetary donation to cover processing.
2. If you do donate to libraries, don’t be too disappointed if your books end up on a booksale shelf in the library or are quietly discarded. Libraries too run out of space and they cannot keep every gift they receive. (I once knew a faculty member who found his esoteric treasures in the library’s dumpster, fished it out, and donated the books again. They were discarded once more, retrieved again, and re-donated until the library administrators finally put an end to it.) 
3. A more satisfactory way to donate is to research your target library’s collection. Figure out which of your books your library already has or has access to electronically. That way you can determine what they might actually need and want. We identified several boxes of books that fit our library’s collection and donated them along with a list of titles to make things easier.   
4. You don’t have to donate everything at once. If you have a little storage space, stagger your donations. We have another couple of boxes waiting to be researched and donated. But it doesn’t make sense to overwhelm the library staff or yourself.
5. The flip side of deciding what to donate is deciding what not to donate. You want to keep things you are currently working with, of course. I’ve also kept books that my local libraries don’t have (and don’t necessarily want) but that are important to my work (classics of linguistics or older style guides are still on my shelves along with books from friends and former teachers).    
6. Be realistic. Don’t expect your donation to be on the shelf in the library the very next day. Books need to be processed, bar-coded, security-stripped, and entered into the circulation system, all of which takes time and staff. If you think you may still need a particular book in the near future, hang onto it a bit longer. The library will still be there.
7. There will always be some books that your local libraries don’t need and that you don’t need to hold onto either. If they seem make to be a coherent collection—the history of detective fiction, food narratives, fabric arts, forensic linguistics, or American dialects, for example—you might find a specialized library that is interested in them, though you may have to pay for shipping (at the lower book rate). If your remainders are more thematically random, they may need to go to your local thrift stores or to the little free libraries in many neighborhoods. You can try to sell them to second-hand bookshops, but you’re likely to end up with just enough for coffee.  

Take your time, be strategic and realistic, and remember that once you’ve made your donations, you’ll have some room on your bookshelves for new acquisitions.

_{Featured image by Leora Dowling via Unsplash.}