Books

[paulkincaid]

Yesterday, during one of those increasingly rare lulls between torrential rain (right this moment, the road out front is a river), the guy from Oxfam came around and collected 22 boxes of books. That is somewhere just over 2,000 volumes. For anyone who likes to keep track of these things, those are mostly nonfiction books on gardening, food, and a handful of other topics that I am not really that interested in, and frankly I needed the shelf space. Even after this clear-out, far too many of my shelves are double-stacked. Anyway, that is the last big clear-out, any further donations to Oxfam will go in a plastic carrier bag. But I am still somewhat taken aback by how many books I have got rid of, and how little difference it has made to my library. I always used to estimate that we had approaching 10,000 books in the house. Well, over the last couple of years something in the region of 5,000-6,000 volumes have gone to Oxfam, and I know for a fact that I still have nearly 9,000 books on my shelves (with a number still uncounted). Where on earth did they all come from?