Spring Cleaning
Physical and virtual
Books accumulate. Every once in a while I think it’s a good idea to comb through them, one by one, and weed out the ones I’m not currently using or unlikely to use again soon. The approach is somewhere between the one I take toward tools in the garage (am I ever likely to need this, or did I get it to do a particular job that’s done and I’ll never do that again?) and clothes in my closet (did I wear this last time it was in season and is it in good enough shape to wear again?). It’s similar to the “does it give you joy” test. If I’m not using something, though, I generally don’t keep it around.
This same practice, unfortunately, doesn’t apply to my digital libraries. The Kindle bookshelf, for example, is sagging beneath the weight of 339 titles. My Audible library has about 430 books. I’ve had Audible longer than Kindle. I don’t remember when I started buying books on Audible, but I was a charter subscriber when the service launched and a stockholder long before Amazon bought the company in 2008. And I’ve got an external hard drive filled with out-of-copyright old books I downloaded from Google Books back when that was possible. All those collections are probably in dire need of a thorough examination and a purge of material I no longer need. This is, of course, not really necessary in the same way purging the physical bookshelves is. Virtual shelves can expand indefinitely, so I really don’t need to clear space for new titles. But I still feel that urge.
The books on the shelves next to my desk are ones I think I might use during the next year. I’ll be starting to prepare my fall courses this week: Modern World History, US History I, and a topics course on the Gilded Age and resistance. The office has another set of shelves (older ones made of real wood that don’t sag!) for things I’m not teaching. I moved my history of religion and secularism, references, literature, and fiction there. The books on the file cabinet are from the library. The books on the chair are discards— and there’s another row behind the ones you see. I’ll box them and give them away to students if we resume on campus in the fall.