So many little jobs are getting done during the lockdown that I'm sure the house and garden have never looked better or been so clean. Today I took all the books off the bookshelves and gave them a little brush over and re-arranged them in a more logical order. The picture shows the shelves in the study but there are more in the dining room, my work room and the children's room.
Part of my housekeeping process is to weed out anything that I don't love or need and I pass them on to local charity shops so that they can benefit other people. Since my father died I have been quite strict with myself about this as while I was dealing with his book collection I realised it is possible to have too many books.
To Dad, books were almost sacred objects, and once they entered the house they were never likely to leave, even if they got damaged or he didn't like them. He actively built up many shelves of non-fiction books to make a library for himself, and for a while, this was all good with plenty of good quality books that would benefit himself and the family. The rot started to set in when he discovered charity shops, and the books were so cheap that it was no longer necessary to be quite as selective. Every week he bought more and quickly had more than he was ever likely to read.
After he died my Mum moved to a smaller property and we had to decide what to do with all the books. We started by deciding what we wanted to keep and a book deal from Hey-on-Wye came to whittle out the rest of the good stuff. By the time he left, his transit van was full of boxes but that still left thousands more.
Anything in decent condition went to Oxfam book shops, but there were many books that just fell apart when we took them off the shelves, so they had to be put into the paper recycling bins at the local supermarket. (Yes, you are allowed to do this!) While I was heaving in a few non-descript books on topics such as macrame and construction of herbaceous borders, the big steel lid suddenly fell down on my hand and crushed the top knuckle joint of my middle finger. I couldn't help but wonder if Dad had given it a shove as punishment for destroying all those books!
Anyway, since then I have kept my own books to a limit of what fits on the shelves, and if I get a couple of new fiction books, I have a look to see if there is anything that can go. I have decided that there is no point at all in keeping books that I wouldn't want to read again, and it is far better to let someone else have the benefit of them while they are still in a good enough condition to pass on.
The other thing I should point out is that books that have been neglected on shelves for many years become ideal homes for tiny white mites, and nobody wants their bookshelves to become a zoo!
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