How do you curate your books?
Emotion? Usefulness? Historical value? Aesthetic?
Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of The Bell!
I’m at our house in France right now, and that means projects. Last year, we moved my father-in-law from Paris to live here in the countryside full time, and with him came many, many, many books.
One of the main projects at the house right now is editing down all kinds of items that (A) came in the move and (B) have been in this house for ages, and making space to, you know, live. Books are a huge part of that.
The books span decades, even centuries, since publication; paperback, hardcover, and leather-bound. There are periodicals. Every genre imaginable, with a heavy emphasis on history. It’s all here, and it’s all mixed together. Thousands of volumes.
How would you choose what to keep and what to get rid of?
The criteria my husband and I are using is primarily what we define as interestingness. Would we, or our close family and friends who visit, or future generations, be likely at all to pick it up and page through it? Probably not? Then it goes.
That means a lot of the paperbacks from the 80s and 90s are getting tossed, and most likely a huge multi-volume medical dictionary from the late 19th century. (The latter is no doubt interesting to someone, just not to us.)
My hope with getting rid of books is that they’ll end up in the hands of someone who does find them interesting and really values them in their collection. Items in your home are meant to have personal meaning, in my opinion, and oldness alone is not enough to lend meaning. Not in France, at least!
There are also many old and pretty books that don’t pass the interestingness test, and I’m going to sell those on my next visit here. I’m well aware of the trend to buy books as decor that one has no intention of reading, and pretty, vintage French leather/marble paper bound books are perfect for this. (If you’d like to be alerted when I list them, let me know in the comments! It’ll be like 6 months, but I will get back to this project and alert you.)
What’s the role of family historical interest in curating books?
For us, it’s definitely a factor, but it doesn’t take total precedence.
The medical dictionary happened to belong to an ancestor, rather an important one, who in the late 19th Century was a doctor, added a second story to our house, and served in Parliament representing the Maine-et-Loire region. There’s even a street nearby named after him!
Why would you consider getting rid of his dictionary, you ask? Because we’re fortunate that this is not our only memento of him. Not even close. This family has, ahem, retained a lot of stuff from the past. That means a lot of editing has fallen to our generation because of the sheer buildup over time, but it also means we have a lot of good things to work with. And no shortage of them belonged to this particular ancestor.
So, we haven’t totally decided yet, but the dictionary set may go.
But what about when we are the family history 100 or 150 years from now? We don’t want to keep everything from the ancestors but erase ourselves. Obviously this could lead down a path of justifying keeping way too much, but my husband and I allow ourselves the occasional indulgence that we think would be funny for future generations to discover: for example, a guide to using a PC from 1997. When we’re long gone, it will just be quietly there, on a shelf, waiting for someone to pick it up and have a laugh at how we lived in the stone age of computers.
So how do you curate your own book collection?
Do you even buy books?
Coffee table books only?
Do you buy a novel you intend to read once, or borrow it from the library?
Prefer audiobooks or e-readers?
What about cookbooks?
What about books you didn’t choose, but that were thrust upon you?
Do you feel guilt when you get rid of books, especially if they have some sort of nostalgia or significance attached?
I would love to have a conversation about this!
xx Jane
P.S. I’m not lifting any heavy boxes, don’t worry Mom. xoxo
This is great! We have so many books. They overflow in different rooms in our house. I do love supporting the library, small bookshops, and I do listen to audiobooks on my commute which makes the time go by faster (and is more interesting). I have a very hard time getting rid of books, but I do wish I had more as family heirlooms. My in laws have a very impressive book collection so I hope we have a chance to continue that collection in future.
This is a great topic. I generally have an easy time getting rid of books since I've always lived in small spaces and used to move regularly. A few years ago when my husband and I had to downsize our collections to move in together, choosing what to keep was determined by (1) sentimentality, (2) how likely we were to revisit the book, and/or (3) how difficult it would be to repurchase or check the book out from the library.
For purchasing new books, I try to only buy ones that I think are worth having in hard copy. This usually means coffee table books, books only available in print, and the odd textbook. Pretty much any book that isn't picture-heavy or only available in print is purchased as an ebook or borrowed from the library. My husband and I are both readers, but we don't like feeling overwhelmed with stuff (although we're admittedly running out of space! I recently realized we both quietly set up personal overflow areas 😂).
All of that said, our rules will probably be revisited/relaxed when we buy a house since we won't have to be as ruthless with preventing clutter. I'm excited to follow your process of paring down the family collection. My husband and I both have tons of books still living at our parents' homes that will need to be sorted and moved when we have a more permanent place of our own.