What to do if your house is overflowing with books

Now I'll need to go through my collection of ancient Greek textbooks from the 1940s to see if they would take any of those ...

What do archive.org do with books once they've been "archived"?

I have much more faith in the ability of paper books to maintain an archive of knowledge and experience, than an ever-expanding digital warehouse that is reliant on charitable donations.

There are some big gems in there.

I was once reading 'Rhetoric' by Aristotle on the site and noticed a lot of marginalia. Some of it was pretty good commentary too.

Well, it turns out that I was reading John Adam's copy with all his notes.

I wish they had a better method of surfacing all these gems that they have. They might and I'm just lazy.

(And, yes, I've tried to find the link, but unfortunately I need more coffee. If someone can find it, please post it)

Well, you might also want to buy another bookshelf at some point, but otherwise I don't see the flaw in the logic.

Same I am a public library user for this very reason.

Same, I gave away nearly all my books, I kept less than 10 really as mementoes of specific memories I associate with those books.

No regrets, I was never going to read any of those that I gave away and I do all my reading on ebook nowadays anyway.

A few years ago I sold/donated every book I own. Literally every book, except for a handful of author-signed books that had memento value.

Most things I can find online or at the library. There were a few out of print books that I can’t get through the library and I regretted selling, but they were easy enough to replace. I now have a very small collection (single shelf) next to my desk.

Turns out 9 out of 10 of the books I thought I could never part with, I have never thought of or cared for since I got rid of them.

10/10 would purge again.

Ditto. Renting in London means space is a premium and moves are frequent. I limit myself to one bookshelf. I also try to get everything digitally that I can.

I have even lost the positive emotions I use to have seeing a bookcase.

All I see now is "what a pain in the ass".

The physical nature of books use to be a feature over ebooks and audio books for me but now they are a total bug.

Nice Monkey.

When you have to move around the country a bunch of times in a few years and each time those precious books make up more than half of a 26' ft truck packed tightly into small, heavy boxes, you get tired of having books quite quickly...

...but then again, I can't find many to part with anymore after all of the rounds of culling that were done. And so it goes.

You can do a lot of clever book storage, but it tends to be quite a lot of work to do so. Because you’re going to have to build things yourself to make it custom fit. This is a process which involves quite a lot of creativity and spatial awareness to do well, on top of the manual labour and at least some craftsmanship (books are heavy) to accomplish. So it’s not weird to me at all that many people struggle with it. I mean for many that combination of things + the time it takes isn’t easy, and then if you can’t pay for it, it’s just a massive project to accomplish in your free time. Tinyhome and DIY YouTube videos are excellent for inspiration, but it’s still a lot of work to get it done in a way that looks nice.

What strikes me as the wildest, and this is obviously very anecdotal for the place where I live in Denmark, is how little help you can get from “pre-made” solutions. IKEA has the least inspiring book storage options known to man. Which might be expected, but around here every store is basically stocking what IKEA has, at least until until you get into the 10x and above price ranging. Which is where you’re probably hiring an interior designer and handymen to do it for/with you anyway. You can do a lot of clever hacks with a lot of the Ikea styles furniture, but much of it is in really shitty materials and for books (books are heavy) it’s almost always better to buy wood and stuff to hang wood on walls and then do it yourself.

So while I agree with what you say, I also appreciate why it’s just easier to have a pile of books.

This is what I do to get rid of books. There are a few near my home, so if I go for a walk around the neighborhood I'll bring a book to dropoff. It's really interesting to see which books stay and which books leave. Nobody's picked up the haskell book in the months it's been there, but Watchmen has come and gone a few times.

We have about 10 working walking distance of our house. The only thing that’s prevented me from putting one up myself is the number of Little Free Libraries around. I’ve been trying to come up with a fun alternative. There is a “little blockbuster” concept, but I feel like of mostly just lose my movies instead enriching the community.

There are about 4 near my home. I check them regularly. They are filled with books that stay there for several months. I'll add one when there's room.

If I was running one, I'd have maybe 10x what will fit in it, and constantly rotate them. The ones that don't move within a couple months go to the thrift store.

P.S. the books I add are scifi. They never last more than a week :-)

The Marie Kondo method may be helpful here.

Acknowledge that the Visual Basic 6 book has done its job for you, thank it for its service, and lovingly place it in the recycling bin.

Think of it as allowing a loved colleague to retire in their old age rather than firing a friend.

I threw out my original CP/M Primer that I had owned since the 1980s (No idea why, I've never owned a CP/M system).

About 6 months later an emulator was released that I could have played in :(

Here's how I think of it. They either go to the landfill, or your house is a landfill. So you're not really saving stuff from the landfill.

I'm in the process of helping my mom sell her house and move into a small apartment. Fortunately her nearby public library takes donations. I think that they have an annual book sale and use the proceeds to support library operations.

I've gotten pretty ruthless about throwing things away. It's not too hard to follow a plan such as a cubic foot per week. The number of books that I'm emotionally attached to dwindles with time.

Discard out. They're just inert objects, with little utility. You won't find those books at the public library any more because libraries ruthlessly weed out books people no longer want. Otherwise there'd be no room for the new books people do want.

Some of those old books are kinda fun to read, but if they're not going for much on Amazon I'd just recycle them.

Allow yourself to keep one. Put an inscription in the front mentioning when you got the book and who gave it to you. Throw the rest out.

Keeping the one will remind you of the entire collection. And it's a nice memento of your childhood, and of those who helped you learn.

I threw my Visual Basics 6 in 24 hours out ages ago, now I wish I still had it for nostalgia.

I burned all mine for heat, giving the books one final purpose. I got rid of things that used to be very precious to me -- an ancient book on HTML, a very old guide to CSS, hilariously outdated texts on stuff like Java 1.4 design patterns, guides to software that doesn't exist in any form and stuff like that. The books served their purpose. They were born from the carbon in the air and back to the Earth they went.

Recyclers will pay good money for books since they tend to be high quality/clean paper. If they are outdated tech books in particular, I have zero guilt recycling those.

If I find that kind of shit in my free library, it immediately goes to the (properly recycled) trash. Nobody will take it, it's just taking up space and bringing down the attractiveness of my library.

100% but the actual reading on a physical book is better, right?

My ideal situation would just to lend my 300 books to a library that ships anywhere in the world when I finally want to read, and then take it back when I'm done. Or a PDF...

But now they are all here, and I rather have the space instead of the books...

Yeah for some people e-readers are great. For others they ruin the experience of reading.

I have an e-reader because there are some out of print books, particularly related to stage magic, that I can only find in digital form. But I despise reading on the thing. As much as "e-ink" is a better experience than reading on a computer screen, it still doesn't quite match the aesthetic and "ergonomic" qualities of reading ink on paper for me. The smell is missing. The joy of turning the pages is missing and if I'm dealing with a particularly large or graphic-heavy PDF then the performance problems remind me that I'm dealing with a piece of flawed modern technology that is still iterating towards perfection rather than the brilliant simplicity of a tool that has "just worked" near-perfectly for hundreds of years (with obvious caveats related to long-term storage and preservation).

But I also don't travel much, I'm a home owner and I work from home so I don't have the majority of the problems that e-readers are good at solving.

If I were moving a lot, had to commute for an hour or two each day or lived in a small condo then my book collection would be impractical and an e-reader would begin to look a lot different to me.

Just use something like Calibre to back them up and break the DRM on them (for the ones you can). I've had Amazon remove a few titles that I couldn't down load later because of publisher disputes, and there have been many instances of them updating books for modern audiences that brought unwanted changes. The downside to always connected digital media - it can be ephemeral. In that regard books are far superior.

You also need to consider accessibility...

No point having a book if you can't conveniently retrieve it.

I’m sure you’re joking, but having recently finished reading “Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things”, there _are_ people who live that way. I think piles of magazines & newspapers were more common than books, with “goat paths” through them.

If you can pack them closely enough, you'll end up with a portal to https://wiki.lspace.org/L-space

Presumably you can fit a few more books in there too.

I think there are books that cover this topic. I've bought "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up", "It's all too much", "Decluttering at the Speed of Life" and more...

BookWyrm, a creature that hoards books like dragon hoard gold.

And discussed a few times in the past on HN:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> There’s something strange about

> the human proclivity

to pathologize behaviour that has yet to be understood. Labeling psychotics as posessed by demons comes to mind. ADHD too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElaL9Zo_Oes

[edit]

Zero snark intended

In the sealed containers in basement storage, is there any benefit to using silica gel? Or is there not enough moisture to matter?

Earlier this year we cleared my parents house prior to selling it, which meant dealing with my father's book collection. He had wide ranging interests, from jazz to town planning, and it was quite a task figuring out what of the 1500-odd books was junk, what was worth donating, and what was worth selling.

Some was easy: the 200 or so mountaineering books were gratefully received by the Alpine Club library, and the few first editions (Dylan Thomas, John Betjeman, folks like that) got £750 from a bookseller. The ones that have been most difficult to find a good home for are the large format art books, which no-one seems to want.

And I've kept too many fascinating volumes, so it hasn't exactly helped my book collection, but we've found homes for most of them.

I'm not one for collecting stuff for the sake of collecting stuff, but I do have a fair number of books. Some of them are for reference, and a lot of them hang around because it's easier to put the book on a shelf once it's read than take them down to the second-hand store.

You analogy isn't the best, because one guitar is a reasonable substitute for another guitar, whereas a Mr Men book doesn't substitute for, say, "Modern Compiler Implementation in ML".

Books are fantastic. I definitely would judge a person that has books for display only. It is easy to tell too.

Books are not only novels and the best sellers you find at airports. You can check a fact or a chapter of a textbook to learn or refresh some math problem. You can revisit your own notes on a margin of a novel. You can lend them.

Books promote curiosity. While they can be superficial I think dismissing them like that is just anti-intellectual.

Other posts in this thread say you can find the books online. As an example, I challenge anyone to find the Princeton Companion to Mathematics, a beautiful book, online. Not all content is always online, as some people think. We need books.

Additionally, physical books are more difficult to destroy than digital books, can be smuggled and resold, and do not have changing conditions or price of access. They also do not care what is the prevalent opinion of something they contain. Just a block of wood waiting for us to read it.

Now I feel like ordering more books today.

Edit: added the additionally part and grammar.

>I get about 30x the value in 1/2 paragraph of fiction than TV.

How do you even begin to quantify this

I designed and built my own. Available in two varieties. Paperbacks and hardbacks. I swear that just about every book case I've ever looked at is designed by someone who doesn't own a lot of books, doesn't love books, and doesn't really think about books other than things that go on coffee tables or a few shelves. I made my book cases 26" wide, pine for the carcase, maple for the shelves that can be flipped over and work in any direction. 7' 8" tall, which means it will clear a standard height 8ft ceiling in just about any house in the US built in the last 50 years. Book case depth was either 6" deep or 8.5" deep depending on if the book case was meant to hold paperbacks or hardbacks. A single fixed shelf at the one third mark. Shelf pin holes every 1.5". Limited width of shelf means the span won't sag very much, maple has a high Jenka rating, so it doesn't sag as much as composites or fast growth pine. If the maple shelves do sag a bit over time, flip them over and then they can sag back the other way. If the front of the shelf gets dinged up, flip it around. The fixed shelf prevents the carcase from bowing out, and placing the shelf about 1/3rd of the way up permits maximum flexibility in shelf positioning. Interesting side-note, the paint on 30 book cases weighs more than 40lbs.

My ~/documents/books folder is very quickly replacing my bookshelf. Integration with org-roam means my library can be massive and still accessible. It doesn't look particularly great though.

I bought CD storage boxes, like https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000EFJY3U/, and then used both the lid and the box to put paperbacks in. Stored alphabetically, spine up. I then stuck those in cupboards.

It is amazing how much more efficient this is for paperbacks than a regular bookshelf!

And that reduced my problem down to one which a regular bookshelf could handle, albeit with some creative packing into the bookshelf.

Yes!

I have a long-term plan to use books as poor-mans-but-pretty-or-at-least-unusual sound insulation. As floor to ceiling as possible whilst also being shelved.

Not for a party room, but for a reading room / library / study / peaceful room.

I'm not planning to move house anytime between now and my, hopefully far distant, death.

May very well be a dust allergy

I also use Goodreads app for cataloging our purchases. I don’t like it that much but works.

That's what bookshops are, no?

Here’s one guys effort at something similar: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5543

Some Good comments on guillotines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36206526

Reminds me of Professor Van Helsing's language in Dracula