We Gave Away Over 1,000 Books

It felt like getting rid of extra family members

My family and I are in the process of moving out of my childhood home, where we’ve been comfortably settled for nearly 15 years.

As hard as it is to say goodbye to our home, it’s almost harder to tackle downsizing one of our favorite things: our books.

We’ve been slowly (and sometimes not-so-slowly) collecting books for years. I firmly believe that your possessions expand to fill your space, and that is exactly what happened to us. As a family of bibliophiles, we filled our house with bookshelves. Then, we filled those bookshelves with hundreds, thousands, of books.

We’ve had to make some very difficult choices about what to keep and what to give away, and both of those categories of decisions have been challenging for different reasons.

Our books tell our family history

For as long as I can remember, we’ve had a collection of books handed down from generations of relatives past. They sat alongside our more modern acquisitions, reminders of our family history. They became fixtures of our décor — even now, I can picture my dad’s library with clarity: the mint color of the Voltaire, the five feet of maroon dedicated to the Harvard Classics.

As we sifted through our collection of older books, we were greeted with marginalia from the past: thumbnail-size portraits, old personal library stamps (which I loved so much, I ordered one of my own), newspaper clippings, typewritten poems, pencilled notes about the weather, postcards turned sepia with age. I was able to connect with the great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers I never got the chance to meet. All I wanted to do was look through every book, hunting for underlinings, offhand comments, old brochures, anything.

Of course, we didn’t have the time for that. Many of our older books were crumbling, musty-smelling, falling apart at the bindings. We simply didn’t have the space for them.

So, we had to make the heart-wrenching decision to find new homes for over 1,000 of our books, including the ones marked with our family history.

Books are surprisingly hard to offload

After this series of painful decisions, we were faced with a new challenge: where could we take this enormous collection of books?

We had several options. Goodwill. Thrift stores. Public libraries. Used book stores. Donation Boxes. Little Free Libraries.

We started going down the list, trying to locate the best possible home for our books. We were shocked when every single avenue became a dead end. Goodwill and thrift stores in our area were overrun with inventory, and wouldn’t accept anything more. Our public library was closed to donations for the foreseeable future. Local used book stores were similarly overrun and closed off to additional acquisitions. There were no donation boxes in our area, and we had far too much volume for a little free library.

I finally turned to Facebook Marketplace, where we’ve been selling a ton of our stuff. I listed the entire collection of books as FREE, hoping someone would be interested in at least a subset of titles.

It took awhile to get any bites, but I lucked out when John (not his real name) messaged me, offering to take all of my books. ALL of them, regardless of genre, author, age, condition, cover type.

Over the course of two weekends and a lot of backbreaking labor, we transferred 75% of our collection to the back of John’s van. During that second trip, John told me where the books were eventually headed. I couldn’t have been more delighted.

John said that his brother was a principal in a school district north of where we lived, in a city that had been devastated by flooding a few months prior. The floods had completely destroyed the public school libraries. All of the books John was taking off our hands were going towards rebuilding these libraries for schoolchildren.

What a wonderful new home for all of these books that we’ve loved so much.

The special joy of finding a new home for something you’ve loved

Knowing that John is shepherding some of our most prized possessions to the best possible new home is enormously comforting.

We have such a special relationship with books; they’re like little worlds that live on our shelves, portals to other dimensions we can escape to whenever we want. Because of that, giving up books can feel like giving up friends, family members, freedom.

Then again, there’s the feeling of pleasant weightlessness that comes with reducing our possessions. Letting go of books elicits a complicated, contradicting set of emotions, but knowing that our books will bring joy to children for years to come trumps all sadness, regret, or grief.