I am in the process of having a declutter
as we just might be moving, a previous piece* deals with all the horrors of that
separately.
My biggest task was/is a large collection
of books, I love books and am loath to part with them yet the truth is apart
from a few most have served their purpose and one section especially falls into
this category.
Books on gardening, there are coffee table
books, history of books, plant guides, single genus specialist books,
landscaping books, water garden books, soil management books, design manuals,
specialist design books, manuals on costings, material usage books, plant and
tree sourcing books and on and on.
Most of these come from my time designing
and creating gardens, though some are purely for pleasure and some have a
sentimental value, being tomes from people I have known and revered.
The fact remains that apart from endless
trade catalogs and fact sheets that have been disposed of the books remain or
the bulk of them do, well over a hundred remain on my shelves with no obvious
purpose left for them.
The knowledge gleaned from the reams of
writings has been used and what I need now in life is stored in the old gray
cells; the books apart from a select few are redundant.
So what to do, the specialist and “rare”
books I decided I would put on eBay, that is until I saw that there are
countless same volumes already on there that simply don’t sell whatever the
price, so that wasjunked as an avenue
of disposal.
What about charity shops? On principle I
will not give to the enormous charities that pay executives huge salaries
whilst the staff work for nothing, so that leaves the small ones and they when
approached said they have too many books and no thank you.
I then thought that local gardening
clubs/associations was a good route to explore; from those that bothered to
answer the result was negative, one explained that they have a members' library
yet only two books had been borrowed in twelve months, so again they politely
declined my offer.
The sad truth is people simply do not read
anymore, or certainly not as in years past, all information can be obtained on
the internet. There is no need for hefty tomes to invade your ever-smaller
living space: you have a problem then seconds later you have the answer in
front of you - all the sections I mention above can be extracted from the web.
Is it the end of books apart from those
posh coffee table adornments? To a large degree I have to agree and say yes.
The same can be said for my map collection. I had endless maps of various parts of the country, Europe and the world, most
out of date and virtually all never to be used again. The sat nav and mobile
phone apps have seen the end of maps apart from the basic back up variety so with no one wanting them either, into the recycle bin they went.
I have always believed books have a special
place in one's life: we learn from them, we are entertained by them and many are
reminders of times gone by, by association or time placement, so what to do? I
am adverse to dumping them so will in the end take them with me, no doubt to
claim a corner of my study until I pop off and someone else has the sad duty to
put them in the skip along with much else that will be available at that
juncture. The unloved, unwanted book, not words I thought I would ever say.
