Why you should not get rid of books

"Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity." Umberto Eco.

For most of us, it’s not realistic to keep every single book we buy. And yet I suspect that for the majority of you reading this newsletter it’s always a bit of a wrench when a book threatens to leave home forever.

What often happens at Johnson Mansions when shelf space becomes beyond squeezed (and I can’t face any more doublebanking or lugging books in boxes into the attic) is that I pull together some potential titles for dispersal and consign them to a cardboard box. This box stays initally in the basement, ready to be removed. Then after a few days, heads up to the hall, ready to be removed. Time’s winged chariot is always hurrying against me so I don’t get to the charity shop for a while. Then one day I idly look through the box and notice there are several books in there which I really don’t want to get rid of. So I take it back downstairs to the basement. And after a few days, because it’s a bit in the way, I put all the books back on the shelves.

Umberto Eco laid out the theory of hanging onto to your books rather more elegantly. He compares books to medicines - there are plenty of different ones to choose from in your medicine closet/drawer/box, each one waiting for it’s time to shine. "Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it,” he writes. “They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity."

Let’s start with a horror story. In Linda Grant’s excellent I Murdered My Library (a 28-page Kindle Single worth 96p of anyone’s money - 96p, that’s less than a Mars Duo) she finds herself in a position where, as she puts it, “books cease to furnish a room and begin to overwhelm it”. When she moves from her four-floor home to a two bedroom flat, she accepts that she will have to downsize her book collection. But - brace, brace - when she moves in, she realises that in fact there is more bookshelf space than she realised. SHE HAS GOT RID OF TOO MANY BOOKS! Don’t be like Linda, be bookshelf aware.

From a practical point of view as a writer, it certainly makes sense to go full Silas Marner and hoard all your precious purchases against a cruel, cruel world. And, as newspapers are fond of saying, here’s why.

On one of the sortings mentioned above, I pulled Charlie Connelly’s amply-titled 2012 book Bring Me Sunshine: A Windswept, Rain-Soaked, Sun-Kissed, Snow-Capped Guide To Our Weather from the nature section. I’d not read it, but remembered buying it as part of a bulk purchase from the local church’s Christmas fair (in fact I’d haggled the bookstallholder upwards because they asked for a pitifully low sum for half a dozen decent books in decent condition). Quick flick through, looked ok, but was it really ever going to make it onto my TBR pile? So, slightly reluctantly, it left the premises. This was the Tuesday. On the Friday, I was approached to write a book about the British weather and so had to buy another copy to read for my research. Moral: you should not get rid of books. Even ones that turn out to be not really that useful at all.

A slightly longer example. I’m curently writing a book about reading Welshly. This week I worked on a section about the fictionalised prose poem memoir In Parenthesis by David Jones (1937). I won’t go into detail here about it now because I want you to buy my book when it comes out next year, but long story shortish, Jones includes barrel-loads of footnotes.

Aha, thinks I (in the 18th century voice I use when working at home alone), this could make an interesting little digression about the nature of footnotes. First stop, what have I got on my shelves on the subject? Well, there’s The Footnote: A curious history by Anthony Grafton (1997), an entire book on the subject. Then there are chapters in Invisible Forms: A Guide to Literary Curiosities by Keven Jackson (1999), and Book Parts, edited by Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth (2019). I’ve read none of the Grafton, and only bits of the other two. But I’ve never had any intention of getting rid of them because of exactly this moment. They’re not only extremely interesting, they’re very useful.

Second stop, what examples have I got on my shelves with footnotes? A quickish whizz along them throws up the fabulous ones in the Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser, reams in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days, and a healthy variety in Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine. I love all three but haven’t read the Baker for years so I lose 20 happy minutes on a little reread. Then I come across a few of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Ditto. In fact, I’m not sure I don’t actually prefer the footnotes to the main text. Finally, my eye falls on Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and I wince slightly. Yes, bagfuls of footnotes (indeed footnotes to footnotes) but I can’t bear to even open the covers again for a quick perusal, and anyway, I have enough material for my minor needs. And it’s back to the scribble, scribble, scribble.

So, yes, I do need two copies of Pepys’ diaries. No, six copies of Gawain and the Green Knight is not five copies too many. Maybe I AM going to read the second volume of À la recherche du temps perdu in the original one day. They’re all staying.