How To Weed Your Books Like A Librarian
A guide to making the tough choices when you need to downsize your personal book collection
Getting rid of books. I know for many of a booklover that it sounds like sacrilege. But the reality is that at some time in your life you are going to need to downsize your book collection. You run out of space. You have to move and hauling all those very heavy books is… less than appealing. Whatever the reason, whether you are open to weeding your book collection or resistant and forced into it by circumstances, it is a daunting task.
We collect and keep books for a myriad of reasons: for the aesthetics, for sentiment, because we like them because we want a complete set, or because we plan to read them or reread them (though whether that actually happens or not is a mystery). We have to consider all these often personal reasons in our decision making in order to remove book guilt-free and end up with a collection of books we love.
Disclaimer
Okay, so I’m not to exactly tell you how to weed your books like a librarian. The reason is this — because a librarian is curating a book collection for other people, for a community, and their focus is making a collection that best serves that community; they have to take personal feelings out of it. When it comes to curating personal book collections… It’s all about personal feelings!
However, I am going to share with you how I, a librarian, uses those librarian book weeding skills and adapts them for personal book collection maintenance. We’re going to break down by categories of the books you can get rid of.
Let’s start.
Books you are not reading
One of the main things librarians look at when weeding their library collections is use. How many times has the book been checked out? How many times has it been used in the library?
Applying this to your own collection, one has to ask of your books… Is this a book I have read? Is this a book I have read more than once? Is this a book that I like to have around to reference (whether in a practical sense like a dictionary or cookbook, or maybe you just have a favourite passage you like to reread from a piece of creative writing)?
Any books that we classify as one of our overall favourites is an easy shoo-in, as well as books we reread or reference at any fairly regular interval. The year 2020 gave us one easy measure… if you are locked down inside your house, what books would want to have access to right then and there?
On the flip side of 2020 having been a great litmus test for this… what books have been sitting around on your shelves in a to-be-read state and you didn’t even pick up to read during quarantine. Where I was, all the public libraries were closed in their entirety for several months. What you had on your shelves was it. And I did read some of my “TBR” pile. And others I read a few pages and went ‘Nah.’ And others I had no temptation to pick up at all. Even though I finally had all the time and no other books I had to read first due to looming library due dates. It was very revealing.
Sometimes you have to admit to yourself that the book that you purchased years ago and never got around to reading… you are just never going to read. You are allowed to weed it from your collection. It is not a moral failure on your part. Sometimes it is like when we buy clothes that look good in the store and then never wear in real life. Sometimes it’s just the serotonin rush of being in a bookstore and wanting to buy something. Sometimes you were one person when you bought that book, but you never got around to it. Now you’re a different person, or person with different reading tastes, and that title no longer holds interest to you.
Part from these books. Give up both the physical weight and mental weight of carrying them around on your TBR pile.
Books that are out-of-date
In library land, it’s a regular practice to remove books with out-of-date information — travel guides and medical dictionaries and such. This is not a tactic that exactly translates to personal collections as much.
So instead of ‘out-of-date’ let’s make it… books that are no longer applicable to you. Maybe books you liked ten years ago but now have no attachment to or interest in revisiting. Your life changes, your reading tastes change, your interests change… and sometimes your book collection needs to change to reflect that. It’s okay to let books go that no longer fit your needs.
Books you keep just to show off
It is completely fine to collect and keep books for aesthetic reasons. Do I need three copies of The Lord of the Rings trilogy for strictly reading purposes? No. Do I have three copies of The Lord of Rings because I like the different variations of cover art? Yes.
If you have books that are serving more as aesthetic objects, as art pieces, as showpieces… that is valid. Whether it is because you like the cover art, the leather binding because it is a signed copy, or because it is vintage or an antique. Keeping books for aesthetic reasons is not something we get to do in public libraries, but your personal collection does not have to follow those rules. Your book collection can cross over into being a museum or art gallery, and that curation runs by different rules than the pragmatic. If those books-as-art-objects bring you genuine pleasure to look at, go for it.
When I say because you keep to show off… I mean the books you keep on your shelf purely to show off. Yeah, you might show off your favourite collector’s copy, but if it genuinely makes you happy as well — that’s fine. But are you keeping the complete works of Shakespeare or Ulysses or Infinite Jest on your bookshelf just to look smart to other people? Or something else to verify your nerd cred? Or whatever other purposes that are not that you like the book for book reasons or you like the book for aesthetic reasons?
Take all those books you keep for I’m so smart/cool/literary/geek chic/hipster/whatever clout and put them in a box. Then lift that box. Imagine carrying it up four flights of steps to a new apartment. Is it worth it?
Just take those to a donation bin instead.
Books you feel guilty getting rid of
Like many objects we accumulate in our lives, we attach emotion to them: sentiment and even guilt.
It’s okay to have an emotional attachment to a book. Even if that attachment has nothing to do with the contents of the book. It’s sentimental to you because you have fond memories of reading it with your best friend in middle school or it was a gift from someone special or you bought it at a special bookshop somewhere during a special trip. Whatever it is… it is okay for you to keep things for this reason.
On the flip side, you shouldn’t keep books for negative emotional reasons. The main one here is probably guilt. When you feel obligated to keep a book because it was a gift because you meant to read it because it’s a waste of money for you to buy it and then get rid of it, or by the mere fact that you’d feel guilty about getting rid of any book at all.
Working through that guilt is another matter. Marie Kondo, tidying goddess extraordinaire, recommends thanking your items for what they meant to you or did for you at a time as part of the process of letting them go. Alternately, you may want to shift into clinical, emotionless librarian mode and pretend these books are all the ones with no circulation stats and thus cannot continue being on the shelves if no one wants them.
Or perhaps you can shoot down the middle and comfort yourself with the idea that these books are going to a better place via reselling or donation. After all, isn’t a book in the hands of someone who wants it better than being forgotten on the shelf of someone who doesn’t?
Books that are easily replaceable
This isn’t a category in and of itself, but rather a category that crosses over with the others. This a good test to put to books that are on the borderline between keep and discard. Look, you are always going to be able to get another copy of The Catcher in the Rye. But this out-of-print paperback from the 1980s from a little known author… maybe that will be near impossible to refind.
(Please do not take this as me saying to get rid of The Catcher in the Rye or any and all “classics.” The Catcher in the Rye has a place on my ‘keep’ shelf because I like it, but perpetually in-print, popular titles will be pretty easy to replace if you change your mind.)
Some books, if you remove them from your collection and two years down the line realize you want to read it — they are an Amazon purchase or a library hold away. Others are books you may never see again or have to hunt down through eBay and interlibrary loans and used bookstore shelves with your fingers crossed.
Of course, you can keep commonplace books and discard rarer books depending on the other intersecting factors, but keeping this in mind can help you look at the practicality of your collection.
Books that do *not* bring you joy
This a real Marie Kondo way of looking at the book weeding process, but it works. Books that you read a lot, books that you need, books that give your positive sentimental feelings, and books that you find aesthetically pleasing will all fall under this category because they would be items that bring you a sense of joy.
Alternatively, books that feel like a burden should be on the chopping block. The books you feel obligated to keep. The books you feel guilty getting rid of. The books you just keep around to look smart. Books that you’ve forgotten about and you think you plan to read sometimes but you, in fact, have an absence of feeling for… No joy.
What to do with removed books
One way to soothe the ache of getting rid of books is the peace of mind knowing they are going to another place where they will be wanted. Here are some ideas…
Give first picking of your “discards” to your book lover friends and family and/or to your book club. There may be a few select that you want to pass on as gifts. But… do not obligate your friends and family to take loads of books off your hands. That is just shifting your clutter to someone else. Also, you cannot enforce any guilt on them if they in the future get rid of books you gift to them.
You can sell books, but this is often easier said than done. Selling books piecemeal via Amazon is not really worth it, speaking from experience. However, selling via a yard sale or finding a used book store that purchases used books are a way to make a little bit of money off your books. Repeat that… a little bit of money. Most books do not resell for that much. But in the act of reselling your books, you have the comfort of knowing they are going to a new home that wants them.
You can also donate your books as well. Library, schools, community organizations… Please research what they accept as donations before driving all your boxes of books over. Also… no one wants your books with water damage or missing covers. If you donate them, we are just going to throw them away once you drive away. Please just strengthen your resolve to recycle (yay environment) your books with significant damage and wear.
Wrapping it up
Weeding a book collection can be difficult on various different levels. The first time may be the hardest for a lot of people. I hope this guide will help with some realistic guidelines that include the various ways we keep books for positive and negative reasons.
As someone who has weeded their book collection before (as part of a full-on Marie Kondo purge) and will be doing it again before I move this upcoming summer, I’m telling you it is not as bad as it seemed. To take a piece of advice from Marie Kondo, imagine looking at your bookcase and it is just filled with books you love. Isn’t that a great thought? Not guilt for books you never got around to reading or outgrew or keep as an obligation. Just books you love.
Best of luck in your weeding.
