Cataloging My Books

After you retire, friends you run into congratulate you and inevitably ask what you do with your time. I've got half-a-dozen snappy comebacks, including "napping," "watching the snow pile up", and "whatever I want,"-- all of which are snappy and also true. But there's one thing I don't mention to most people. Are you ready for this? I've been cataloging my books—you know, making lists of them like the old-fashioned card catalogs, only not on those separate little cards but in an Excel spreadsheet on my computer. Yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing with a large chunk of my time lately.

 

Here's how it came about.

 

When I retired a few months ago, I cleaned out my office (including notes, cards, calendars, pictures my granddaughters made, candy dishes, three coffee cups, two lamps, several small tools, personal items, my union handbook, copies of records I thought I might need, articles I'd been planning to read, and a few miscellaneous items) and tossed everything into several boxes. 

Then I got to the books. Now I don't know if you are aware of this, but college professors, especially college English professors, tend to accumulate books. And if we teach any literature classes, especially children's or young adult literature or poetry, we can gather a pretty sizable collection.  So I sorted through the books that belonged to the college and left them on two shelves for my successor, and I brought home the books that were from my own collection.  That amounted to about five boxes full of books. One by one I brought the boxes--miscellaneous stuff and books--into the house. Of course, I could have had had help carrying the boxes in. My handsome and good-natured husband is always ready to lend a hand. He did, in fact, help me with the heaviest of the boxes. But I did a lot myself. I hate to  bother him, you know? I mean, I can lift a few boxes, you know? And it took several trips from school, and he was sometimes busy when I want to move things, you know? Oh, all right. The truth is that I didn't really want him to realize how many boxes I was bringing into our home. My office upstairs was already packed to the gills, as was his downstairs.  So I brought them in and piled them up, and then it was a fait accompli. Kind of. 

The problem, as I suggested earlier, was that I also have a lot, lot, LOT of books at home, many in my office, along with file cabinets of materials I have gathered and kept over a lifetime of writing and research.  Add to the mix books my dad bought me at garage sales because he thought they were old and valuable, papers and books and memorabilia inherited from each of my parents when they died (Dad, 7 years ago; Mom, 2), and you have the perfect storm of stuff. 

So I did the logical thing; I closed the door. I avoided going into the office. But my computer was there, and while I can do email and Facebook on my iPad, printing, typing, and keeping track of my checkbook were better done with the desktop computer. Every few days I would walk into the home office and step over boxes to reach the computer. I had to move them to get into the closet. Once, I walked into the office without turning on the light and ran right into a tower of cardboard boxes that I had forgotten I moved.

After a few months of this awkward dance, I decided I better get busy and do something.  I began with sorting stuff in file drawers, the theory being that if you empty a file drawer, you have room to fill it with something else. Which I did. I also got some plastic containers to house the memorabilia from Mom and Dad. That went to the basement. 

Then I had to tackle the books. It's not as easy as moving them from boxes onto shelves.  There were no more shelves. I am a book hoarder, and all the shelves and all the wall space for shelves was full. Even though I know that some of the books had to go, I wasn't sure how to do it. I can't just put  books into the trash. If I knew they would go to a good home, it might be easier. So I had to do a little research to discover where I could dispose of my books.

Donate to a library sale? Good idea.  I read the website for the Friends of the Library sale.  They would love to have books, but NO TEXTBOOKS.  While my books are not your average K-12 readers and social studies tomes, many of them are books I used in grad school.  Nope, Friends of library won't want  those.

Donate to a college library? Cool. I called the school I just retired from and asked if they might like my collection of teaching materials and graduate school texts. Well, maybe or maybe not. They are downsizing and going to electronically stored and retrieved materials. Plus they really want more current things than stuff from 1996. We'll see.

Sell at the secondhand bookshop? They have a complicated system in which they take your books, fiction, and provide store credit so you can get more books. Like I need more books.  I could just give them the books and not take any new ones home.  I tried that, but ended up with four used paperback mysteries. I'm obviously no good at this. 

Sell them on e-bay, someone suggested. Some of the stuff my dad collected might be of interest to an antiquarian book purchaser. Well, I know a little about computers, but in terms of online commerce, I only understand how to BUY, not how to sell. 

Finally, I remembered my motto: one size does not fit all. Or in this case, one approach doesn't work for everything. So I decided that before I can really get a handle on what to do with this stuff, I better see what I actually have. This is the current plan. Every day I try to spend a little time dusting and sorting the books.  I'm making a catalog, a list of the books I own. On my spreadsheet, I type the author, the title, the publisher, the date of publication, the category of the book. In doing this, I learn what I have, I remember some of the things I read and some of the things I learned in my reading and writing. I recognize again the giants who influenced my thinking. And I am surprised at how many years have passed since each book was published. I also find things I meant to read and never got to.  Some of these I will eventually read, and some I will let go. Some of my favorites I will eventually let go as well.  But first I have to touch them again and take this trip down memory lane. So I am cataloging my books. It's the first step to letting go.