The Great Book Giveaway

by

Paul Clark

Last year I gave away over 1,000 of my books.

Typing that seems like blasphemy. I’m not a book collector. I long ago lost the urge to collect valuable and unique books when my aging cat, after I moved from an apartment to a house, expressed his displeasure at the move by using my one box of signed first editions as a litter box for several days. By last summer, even though I wasn’t collecting books for profit and posterity, I had amassed close to 2,000 books over the previous 30 years.

Almost all of the books that lined the shelves in my living room, front porch and basement, as well as the ones stored in boxes in the basement, attic and garage, had been purchased at less than full price. I rarely buy a book in hardcover unless it is a present. I’m a tireless devotee of garage sales, thrift shops and antique stores that carry books as a sideline. I prefer to shop by looking through discount or remaindered books catalogs rather than by going to a bookstore. I became an expert at nosing out the no-frills sale bookstores that local shopping mall owners use as placeholders to fill up an empty storefront temporarily. In other words, I had amassed my collection on the cheap.

Although I always bought books with the intention of reading them, the fact that I bought them at a pace faster than I could read them meant that they were bought as much for decoration as for reading. So, having books double-shelved, piled on tables, chairs and the floor and lying splayed on a couch never bothered me. To my wife, however, the excess of books (“excess” in her mind, not mine) was something that needed to be controlled. Over the last couple of years, when even my double-shelving technique proved inadequate, I began moving books from the living room to the basement—a sort of domestic recycling plan that explained, however inadequately, the boxes of books in the attic, basement and garage.

But by last summer even I acknowledged that the ratio between the books I bought and the books I read was getting seriously out-of-whack. There was also an increasingly disturbing disconnect between my book buying experience and book reading experience. It was a great pleasure to look through the latest catalog that came in the mail, read descriptions and mark off the order form. It was a greater pleasure a week or so later when the books came in the mail, and I eagerly unpacked them. But even after placing the new books on an already burgeoning shelf, I would find myself still looking for something to read—and this meant a trip the library. That’s right. In spite of my constant purchases, I was going to the library on a weekly basis. (Library books had their own special shelf, so as not to be mixed up, i.e., lost among the books I actually owned.) Now if you read one book a week, which has been my average the last couple of years, but bring in a dozen or more a month . . . well, do the math. The result is not pretty.

The immediate inspiration for my purge was the local library’s annual book sale. Not surprisingly, this sale has been my primary source for my growing collection over the years—hardcovers for one dollar and paperbacks for 50 cents. On the last day, you can pick up as many books as you want for five dollars. Most years, the number of books I purchased at the sale equaled, and usually exceeded, the number I had dropped off.

I found an empty box in the basement and looked over the double-shelved books in the living room’s main bookcase, which stands six feet high and four feet wide. At the very least, I thought, I can make these shelves orderly. But one small box hardly made a dent. I found five more small boxes in the basement, brought them all upstairs, and continued removing books. My criterion was simple—if I had no emotional attachment to the book at that moment, whether or not I had read it, it went into the box.

Such was my collection that when these boxes were full, I still had books lying on top of books as well as more double-shelved, and I hadn’t even looked in the basement, porch or garage. But something had clicked in my head. Merely possessing a book was no longer important. I felt a strong urge to release them. So I went in search of more containers and found a pile of sturdy grocery store shopping bags. For the next few hours, I was a minor dervish of a book packer. The living room shelves became as orderly as a library’s. I removed all the books from the front porch, either packing them in bags or bringing them to the basement. In the basement, I reduced four shelves of double-shelved books to two shelves (the others quickly filled up with non-book detritus). When I ran out of paper bags, I used plastic bags from Whole Foods.

When I was done, I had 41 bags and boxes lined up neatly on my porch. They averaged about 30 books each. Over the next few days I took them over to the book collection spot at the high school. When the library advertises its sale it emphasizes that it features 100,000 books. I proudly noted to myself that I had provided one percent of the books offered that year.

Just now, I went to look at my main bookcase in the living room. Frankly, I haven’t paid much attention to it since last summer. I didn’t reorder what was there, and I haven’t bought that many books. Yet somehow two of the five shelves have a second row of books behind the first one. Although I’ve never considered myself a book collector, I now may have to consider myself a book breeder.


Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he sometimes writes for pleasure, though he keeps these writings under a bushel, and the bushel he keeps in a dark shed outdoors. Paul co-wrote a humor column called “Loose Canons” for the late, lamented Readerville Journal. He recently purged the majority of his books from his shelves. Over a series of essays, he will write about the books that remain and why they are important to him. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it