July 25, 2007

Off the Shelf

“I am on the verge of making a radical decision,” a professor told me in an e-mail note a couple of weeks ago. The plan taking shape was “to get rid of almost all the books I have in my office,” he said, “based on their almost total superfluity.”

He found that he regularly consulted around two dozen volumes – “references, timeless classics, a couple of recent and invaluable syntheses.” But they were always the same titles. The rest were starting to look like “ugly wallpaper.” The sight was getting oppressive and he started to imagine what it might be like to have a change of scenery.

“I feel increasingly overrun by these things that, day by day, seem less useful,” he explained. “I am thinking of keeping only those books I refer to on a regular basis for writing lectures. Anything else, I can get from the library, or in a pinch, find a citation via Google Books or Amazon. I’ve already stopped keeping most paper journals, though there are a few things that aren’t available online. Is this crazy? Is anyone else you know making this kind of decision?”

The implied notion was interesting: my correspondent seemed to think this urge to purge might be a product of the increasing ease of instant access to material not on one’s shelves. I have no idea whether or not this is the case, or whether it represents anything like a trend. But the sense of being overwhelmed by accumulated books is only too familiar. My office and library are at home, and it has been necessary to trim the excess books on occasion, sometimes hundreds of books at a blow, just to keep them from piling up on the floor. (This is known as “preserving domestic tranquility.”)

It seems like a fair guess that, digital access or no, many other people share this daydream of a book apocalypse-in-miniature. I asked my correspondent to keep me posted if he decided to go through with it. As it turned out, this was a formality, for his first note seems to have been a matter of psyching himself up to face the job.

He gave permission to quote from his messages. He is an up-and-coming professor in the humanities who – so it emerged from some passing references – has in recent times taken on some administrative responsibilities. I won’t identify him or name his field, for reasons that are not too hard to understand. There is a potential breach of collegiality in clearing away books by one’s friends or peers.

At the start, my correspondent estimated that he had 130 feet of books occupying his office. That works out to the equivalent, with ordinary bookshelves, of about 40 to 50 shelves’ worth. He said the moment of decision came when he realized that reducing the collection to “the hard core of actually useful information [without] a lot of filler” would have a fringe benefit: “I could fit a comfortable reading chair in my office.”

It sound like the first thing to go was the dream of reducing his holdings to just two or three dozen titles necessary for preparing lectures. This extreme ambition was revised to trimming down to roughly 60 feet of books. The effort would take a few days, he thought; and he hoped to finish before leaving on a trip that would take him away from the office for a week or so.

“I guess the first thing is, we’re talking about work-related books,” he said early in the process. “Maybe that’s a distinction most people don’t make. But P.G. Wodehouse books get kept, at home, and re-read. They’re on separate bookshelves and don’t count for this discussion. The books that really form intellectual landmarks for me aren’t in my office anyway. Things like the essays of William James or Isaiah Berlin, they’re at home where they can be dipped into at leisure.”

After a couple of days, I asked how things were going. Progress was steady, he said, but his new role as bureaucrat was imposing demands on his attention, plus he had just signed up with Facebook. But it sounded like the biggest impediment to ruthless purging came from the mixed feelings that accompanied by the process. “I find it hard to pull the trigger,” he said.

“I’m worried I might suddenly want one,” he wrote. “I feel strangely attached to books I haven’t opened in, no kidding, 12 years. What if I need to? (You won’t need to. Anyway there’s a copy in the library.) What if my colleagues see I don’t have these books anymore? Will I lose intellectual street cred?”

As the veteran of several such deep purges, I can understand his misgivings, and will say that all of them are completely justified. You will rue the cuts you are making. You will be chagrined when something you need, and once owned, is not readily at hand. There is no getting around this. It’s a trade-off: The pleasure of substantially reduced clutter comes only at the price of regret.

Still, it is possible to create so much momentum in the process that you blast right through the second thought – getting rid of books in a kind of frenzy, something akin to the “berserker” state. There is a kind of exhilaration to it. But it requires full acceptance of the reality that there will be pain later: the remorse over titles you never retrieved from the discard pile.

But this professor’s schedule didn’t leave him the option of getting worked up to go all Viking on the task at hand.

“I’m not being ruthless enough on the first pass,” he said, “ and I will have to go back through and cull, again. In hard cases, the question is, how guilty will I feel if I toss it?”

After he’d been at it for a while longer, I asked if he had established a method or a routine.

“It’s going like this,” he responded. “First few minutes of the morning, look over shelves on home office. Shuffle books around, begin to pull books that I don’t think I should really keep. Put in bag. Take to office. First few minutes at office, shuffle books around, pull books I don’t think I should really keep. Look at pile of discards, pull one irresolutely out, flip through to see if I’d written anything in it and if I can tell how long ago. Fidget, put disputed book back on shelf. Remove from shelf and put back in pile. Take a walk up the corridor and back, get impatient, throw all discards in bag, leave in a place where graduate students can pick them over and take what they want.”

Monographic works tended to find their way to the discard pile without doubt or long delay.

“The exercise,” he wrote, “has confirmed concretely what had hitherto been an abstract conviction: it’s a rare monograph that’s actually worth a book. You can digest the idea, pick out a few key pieces of evidence, decide whether or not it really changes your mind about an overall interpretation, and then you’re really, sadly, done with it. Scarcely ever will you revisit it — scarcely ever will it repay you to revisit it, except to check a citation maybe — unlike a good essay or synthesis, which you can always come back to for insights.”

On another day, he wrote: “Monographs suffer unduly in this process; mostly, one gleans them for information and/or ideas. One can very easily remember that a monograph had a particular fact or quotation in it, and can if need be discover it again via Google Books or Amazon’s ‘Search Inside.’”

My correspondent also found himself developing a new appreciation of his library at home. Apart from holding the absolutely essential titles he might want to read on the spur of the moment, it constituted a kind of professional safety net.

“I can always tell people who want to know why I don’t have many books in my office anymore, ‘Oh, I have bookshelves at home.’ True enough, and maybe that monograph of yours is on them.”

But it turns out he won’t be needing that escape clause after all. “In the end,” he wrote near the close of our exchange, “my colleagues’ books all stayed, though one former colleague’s went.”

Along the way, he minted an aphorism: “A personal library is the physical version of a bibliography or ‘for further reading’ section in something you’ve published; some books are there because you actually used them, some are there because everyone else thinks they should be there, and some are there because your friends wrote them.”

On Friday, before he took off for a break, I asked if he’d met the goal of reducing the books on his shelves to 60 feet’s worth – a cut of more than half. He said he had.

“Still some shuffling around to go,” he wrote. “In the end, I decided I could have ‘household gods’ at home, in the household — so shelves of favorite thinkers available first thing in the morning. Reference works, surveys, things needed to look in when giving lectures, are at the office. But generally speaking, the great purge occurred, and it left room to grow.”

The comment about leaving “room to grow” seemed ominous. Having gone through this process myself a few times now, I contemplated the situation with the sense of mingled familiarity and apprehension that Prometheus might feel, upon waking, at the sight of of his new liver.

This might be the right time to adopt the outlook of Mae West. A friend asked her what she wanted for her birthday. “Just don’t get me a book,” she replied. “I’ve already got a book.”

Scott McLemee writes Intellectual Affairs each week. Suggestions and ideas for future columns are welcome.

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Comments

Oh, the pain. . .

Culling book collections...it’s an old issue but never far from most of us reading these lines. Sometimes I swear the things copulate overnight and create new paperbacks which grow up to become hardbacks. I can readily identify with the pain of the author because we have all gotten rid of something (or numerous somethings) that we later needed. My own problem is that I collect things in my own field (the history in and policy of telecommunications and electronic media) but also in a variety of avocational topics that I love but don’t teach (civil aviation history, passenger liners, the history of Washington DC, Sir Winston Churchill, history of fortification [especially castles], archeology in the American Southwest, and, most recently, classic cars of the 1930s!). And Amazon and abebooks have made it SO much easier (and often cheaper) to stay current in all of these! I do miss the dying second hand bookshops, however. But back to the bookshelves...our faculty offices are fairly small and yet I have five bookcases filled with more or less current things. It’s at home where the vast majority of the topics noted above nestle. Now I cull things, too—secondary material of less interest, aspects of any of the above topics that I no longer follow, old titles replaced by better ones. You have to do this. I pride myself on no piles on the floor (well, there are two small ones), neat bookshelves, and an ability to get to all of them. And I live in a townhouse! So as our author above notes, the problem is not just an office library (unless you have an unusually large one—as I did when serving as an associate dean), but the nooks and crannies of home. To really odd part of a constant culling process is finding your discards in a bookshop! Once I found such a book in a shop I’d never been in before—one that was miles from home. You never know the paths your discarded books may take. The moral of this ramble? Keep at the culling—it is a constant process as long as you have things coming in, you have to send some out for use by others. I give a host of things to our university library, many to colleagues, and some to students (I remember loving that when I was a student). Refine your likes and dislikes, get rid of things you won’t ever read again, but save the core you have lovingly built over time. That’s a vital part of you. . .

Chris Sterling, professor at George Washington University, at 8:40 am EDT on July 25, 2007

Solution

I too was once overwhelmed by books. But I came up with a solution. I purchased a small, paper-fed scanner that fits on my desk. If I do not consult a book in a long time, but would still like to keep it around for reference, I rip it up, cut the edges, and scan it. I then back it up on CD or save it on the college’s network drive. No one likes ripping and destroying a paper book, but at least it still exists in electronic form. If I need the paper again, I can always print it off.

PS, at 9:30 am EDT on July 25, 2007

I recently heard an interesting directive, something along the lines of “treasure the text, not the book” (major paraphrasing going on here). The physical book is really just pieces of paper; the words are what matter. That said, I have a TERRIBLE time getting rid of books. In preparing to move to a new residence I’ve been making small purges all summer, selling and donating things. As a reader I’m supremely, almost irrationally attached to some things. Thankfully I have plenty of friends just like me, so I have support for my addiction.

Allison Elliott, Senior PR Specialist at University of Kentucky, at 9:30 am EDT on July 25, 2007

We’re going through a departmental culling right now as we prepare to move to a new building with smaller offices. So many books go to the hall to be picked up by students, and others go home, where there’s no room either. I need to start attacking another bookcase, but I don’t wanna.

Elsie, at 11:00 am EDT on July 25, 2007

Regrets, I have a few, and still no space on my shelves

I’ve purged my books twice only to temporary relief, for the shelves are soon full again and still, years later, I go looking for books that I used to own. Some were college texts that are now out of print, others were specialty works purchased in France, others were—well, 48-cent specials from the sale shelves at a local bookstore. I miss them. Books I’ve given as gifts from my collection I miss only a bit less.

I vow: I will never jettison books again. My wife or son will have to do it when I’m dead.

Grant Barrett, Lexicographer, at 11:05 am EDT on July 25, 2007

I have collected books all my life. One of my sons sent me an article on how to purge them, and why that was important. There is not a room in my house that is not lined in bookshelves, and my children had to deal with that all of their lives. Yesterday, son #3 sent another article from the New York Times which talked about leaders and their proclivity for collecting books. I think he is beginning to understand the wonderful impact it had on his life, leading to his own successes. My son helped me find a lost pride in my life long addiction; after all, this is a new age which does torment me. But now I have to ask: How would my children have known how important books were if they grew up in a house with only a computer that hid away my books from their eyes?

Bobbe Allen, USU, at 11:50 am EDT on July 25, 2007

It Didn’t Work For Me ... Or Did It?

I readily admit that, for me, book ownership is an illness ... like a drug or gambling addiction. In addition, (1) I have an enormous number of both professional books and non-professional fiction and non-fiction and (2) I have very, very few paperbacks (a related illness). Add to that the fact that I have moved around quite a bit. Because I have been fairly free in sharing my books with friends and colleagues and not being willing to keep a record of who has what, for years I used a black Sharpie to write HOYER on the top of each of my professional books.

It’s a long story, but at various time in my life I have been a mathematician, a statistician, a social methodologist, in formal theory and public choice, in management science, in education research, and, as a consultant, in the so-called quality sciences.

After not having taught in a mathematics department for almost fifteen years, I decided to give away my mathematics books, many of which were “classics.” I have a close friend at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, I had visited there on several occasions, and I knew they had a mathematics library/reading room for their students. So I packed everything up and shipped it off with “instructions” that the books should go in their reading room. Guess what? On subsequent visits to Hope, I would drop into the offices of various of their faculty and here and there on their bookshelves would be clusters of books with HOYER emblazoned on the top. Very few made it to the students’ reading room.

Later, after not having taught social methodology for a number of years, I packed up and shipped a large number of classics to the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan for their Summer Program in Social Methodology library. I had been director of that program many years before. I suppose they sorted through the boxes, picked out a large number of duplicates and sent most of my “contribution” to a university somewhere in China.

Not that it matters much to me, but not a word of acknowledgment — let alone a note of thanks — from either. Oh well.

To PS and Allison Elliott I can only say, to an addict like I, books are much more than the words on the page. I am repulsed by the idea of “books” on CD. To Grant Barrett and Bobbe Allen I shout a supportive “Amen!” In the future, if I am inclined to allow a book to reside in my home or office for a year, it will stick with me until death do we part. And then my sons can look things over, scratch their heads in recognition of my illness bordering on insanity, and wonder what to do with all of this garbage. I just hope they don’t send it to Hope College ... or ICPSR ... or China.

R.W. Hoyer, at 1:00 pm EDT on July 25, 2007

And Then There Are The Journals

Some years ago I sat between George Box and Leslie Kish — both previous presidents of the American Statistical Association — at a lecture at the University of Michigan. In the course of our conversation between speakers, I commented that, “about twenty years ago I would get my copy of the Journal of the American Statistical Association in the mail and it would take me three weeks to read it. Now it takes me thirty minutes, max, to read everything I find compelling in an issue of JASA.” They both laughed and agreed that my experience was not unlike theirs.

In any event, I went home that evening, tried to contact a library that would like to have my complete copies of seven or eight different journals over twenty years or more, found none, and recycled the lot as useless paper. Ouch!

Now, is it time to talk about filing cabinets ... or is that something young faculty members have only heard rumors of?

Frizbane Manley, at 1:00 pm EDT on July 25, 2007

I’m adding on a room to my house.....a library!

BPJ, at 3:30 pm EDT on July 25, 2007

the library

This line made me envious, and a little irked: “I feel strangely attached to books I haven’t opened in, no kidding, 12 years. What if I need to? (You won’t need to. Anyway there’s a copy in the library.)” Umm, no, there’s not. My university library’s holdings in my subfield are woefully inadequate—my personal library is several times larger in this area. And I’m constantly amazed to come across citations to books that sound interesting or relevant to my current project... only to realize that I bought the book years ago and forgot about it. I love that feeling. I can’t imagine conducting a large-scale purge of my collection.

Shane in Utah, at 5:35 am EDT on July 26, 2007

Commiserating...

Before I moved here for graduate school I donated about a third of my books to the public library and to Goodwill. Two years later I’ve replaced that third and am really making a concerted effort NOT to buy more. Thankfully the university library is pretty well stocked; I’ve rarely been disappointed. The local library’s not bad either.

I really relate to the idea of getting rid of professional books that you don’t need now that you’re no longer in the profession. I have a lot of programming-language books that I can’t let go of even though I haven’t coded in several years AND the languages themselves are most likely out of date. But I once worked on a project where legacy code needed to be converted; who knows when those skills might be needed again? lol...Very little about love (of books, knowledge, people, etc.) makes sense...

Yaa, University of Iowa, at 8:55 am EDT on July 27, 2007

and-

a good way for professors to thin out the books in their office is to have a professional (or pretty good amateur) thief on campus. I recall a fellow in LA — forget his name, but he was the boyfriend of a gal who is a curator at one of the city’s leading art museums — who used to stroll through the open doors of various profs’ offices at UCLA when they were out at class, help himself to valuable first editions (often signed), then sell them to bookstores around town. One of the profs notified the boys in black, who did some fieldwork, nabbed the young’un as he was sliding some tomes over or under or around the counter someplace, and took him to the county jail where he spent somewhat more time than Paris and somewhat less than your average carjacker.

Robt Ned, at 4:45 pm EDT on July 31, 2007

there’s a whole genre of books about owning books, and some are even quite good (I’m currently reading alberto manguel’s The Library At Night). So I say, bibliomania: why fight it? our time is better spent thinking about why we have these books than talking about getting rid of them.

Lauren, at 6:55 am EDT on August 2, 2007