How to get rid of (more) books (and other things)

The short answer- be persistent.

When we move in a week or two, Beta and I are taking a single car-load with us, and so to prepare we have been cutting down on even more of our possessions.

Clothing was the easiest- for a few months now I've been using to hanger trick and so it was immediately clear what I hadn't been wearing. I also finally gave up on some of my old t-shirts, many of which have stretched or warped and just fit strangely.

DVDs were a little harder- I had to call not just used video stores but used music stores as well. For some reason, Los Angeles seems to have a dearth of used-whatever stores- we had to drive twenty miles to the DVD-buying place I finally found, and got $40 cash for our troubles, which was cool.

Comics were also easy- we went to Pulp Fiction and traded 15 or 16 used comics (half trade paperbacks, half manga) for 3 new trade paperbacks, which was sweet, though a little counter-productive (but totally worth it! DMZ: Blood in the Game FTW!)

Books, though. Oh my.

It really started with a lot of thinking and reading and writing. Only after talking over the issue in my head for a couple of hours could I really bring myself to make book-decisions and begin to cull things off my shelves.

I found two thoughts to guide me:
- "If there was a fire and this was all destroyed, would I replace this specific book?"
- "Five years down the road, is this book something Awesome Happy Future Me would own?"

I found, for maybe the first time in my life, that for a majority of my books, the answers were both NO.

I think that for a long time books were my security- I knew that if I forgot something, I could always go back to the source and look it up. They let me hang pieces of my brain on the outside.

But I'm not at that place any more. As I mentioned in my previous post, when I was culling books there were whole shelves devoted to subjects that just don't hold my interest any more- I've moved on. Most of what remains are: fiction series that I have read and re-read and plan to read and re-read again- old friends that always show me something new; books on urbanism (but not the ones I found un-instructive or boring or not worth reading twice); a few comics (also old friends); and just five Dungeons and Dragons books (I sold thirty such ones last year). It's about a quarter of the high-water-mark, and less than half of what Rigel and I brought to the condo.

We took them one place, which took two of our three boxes. They had a pretty sketchy store credit policy- you could only used credit for up to half of your transaction. As they were offering us $52 in store credit, I'd have to... buy $104 worth of used books? That seemed pretty much counter to my intention to get rid of books. I haggled with the owner, and got him to just trade for two barely-opened Dungeons and Dragons sourcebooks, $40 to him but $70 retail! It was good.

The last box we took to another store the next day, and they bought five books for $6 cash, which was cool, but sort of a waste of time, as they took an hour to get around to us. Frustrated, we took the leavings (which were, weirdly, the nicest, least crappy-paperback-y of all the ones we were selling- urbanism textbooks, a few literary journals, some $14 paper-but-bigger-and-nicer-back sci fi, etc) to OPEN , just down the street from us, where they took everything and gave us store credit, which we plan on selling to someone on Craigslist for cash. OPEN was so plesant and such a well-lit, beautiful store, that I was almost happy just to give them the last few books- I knew it was a good home, or at least a pretty train station from which they would travel to good homes.

Weirdness pervaded the two days it took. What was most difficult was how long selling everything took- the whole process stretched out and gave me long periods of time to torture myself about how callous I was to push away so many words, and at such crappy prices.

It was also heart-breaking to enter so many used book stores- most of them seemed over-full and under-staffed. Apparently the recession is hitting the whole industry really hard- half of the places I called to ask were dead numbers of out-of-business stores, and another third weren't currently buying anything. All the open places were depressingly selective- they only seemed to want quick-selling paperbacks, while nicer-but-slower-selling tomes were shunned as short-term losses, even if they might be long-term gains.

But it's done, and despite the messiness of the operation, another weight has been lifted from my heart.