If you're like me, you probably spend more time worrying about whether you have enough house space to accommodate your growing collection of books than you do worrying about whether your garage is big enough for your vehicles. Perhaps not. The problem of making room for an ever-expanding swarm of assorted paperbacks and hardcovers has been a losing battle for me since at least the end of high school, and it seems that no matter where we move to, or how many new shelving units we construct, or how creative I get with stacking and weeding, eventually I come face to face with the realization that my literacy has once again made massive strategic advances against my elbow room. No matter how much I patronize the public libraries, I still find myself subconsciously placing many of my book rentals into "buy later" piles. When I hear others praise the ways of the Kindle, I get a jones to hoard more pulp and fiber.
Basically, I only make room in order to fill up the newly allotted space. Donating a paperback to the library or trading one in at the used bookstore results in a tiny shelving gap between volumes - a gap with a shorter lifespan than most adult mayflies. And these gaps appear rarely - the vast majority of our book purchases become as familiar to our home as heirlooms or treasured dining ware. The less-loved of volumes often get transferred into cardboard boxes and stored in the gloom of the garage, thanks to some vague, half-formed theory about some future day in which we will revel in a surplus of shelving space and reading rooms, some glowing era of sophisticated urban living with a bookshelf in every corner.
I was recently thrown a bit of a lifeline in this never-ending struggle, thanks to the recommendation from a friend of mine who's waged his own battle against the tyranny of the printed word. A five-year old experiment in soft socialism, PaperBackSwap.com is a site devoted to the notion that one should only purge one's holdings in order to make room for more goods, and if this sounds even less like socialism than our own modest national nods in that direction, I should add that the only money or profit at play in PaperBackSwap is that forked over to the U.S. Post Office (which is, of course, an official Government Agency).
The idea is simple. You enter the ISBN of a book you no longer want, and the system creates a holding for that book. At the same time, you create a list of books you are interested in. Another online member may have a request for the book you've just posted. You are then obliged to send this book along to that member, courtesy of the postal service, which means you pay media mail rates - generally $2.35 or so, at least for smallish paperbacks (while the site name suggests they traffic exclusively in paperbacks, one can send along and trade any book of any size, with the understanding that shipping costs will go up a bit the larger and heavier the book). When you send your book off, you gain a credit for one book owed you. At this point, any available book you've listed as wanting will be shipped to you, free of charge, by another member (they will pay the postal charge). It's pretty simple. And for those with a large number of small paperbacks, the site even offers simple wrapping materials that comes directly from your home printer.
In the handful of weeks I've been a member of this (so far) free service, I've unloaded over a dozen unwanted or non-necessary volumes, and have gained a nice new stack of books that have long existed on a personal mental grocery list. The vast majority of these have been semi-contemporary fictional works of authors whose names have been familiar to me but whose works have not, such as :
-Edward Whittemore and The Sinai Tapestry (terrible vintage cover)
-East German writer Christa Wolf's 1984 reinterpretation of Cassandra
-Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk's Snow (a novel my mother-in-law explicitly dissuaded me from reading, but oh well....)
-South African J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (my wife recently read and enjoyed Coetzee's Disgrace, so it was time to play some catch-up)
-Michel Houellebecq's supposedly graphic and controversial The Elementary Particles (note to self and others: this book has also been translated and released as Atomised, which I only discovered after receiving a copy of each)
-Iris Murdoch's The Bell (never too late, right?)
-Joan Didion's collection of California essays, Where I Was From
-William Trevor's The Story of Lucy Gault (our recent trip to Ireland had me hungering for contemporary Irish literature)
-and critic James Wood's venture into the novelistic form, The Case Against God
That's quite a nice stack already, and no doubt I'll be shuttling some of these volumes around in boxes or between shelves in the following years, many possibly still unread, as we move along our merry way. But that's the way of things. Whereas a closet full of never-before-worn clothes is a sad and drooping sight, running the risk of burst seams from changing waistlines and the infestation of moth and mold, a shelf of unread books is merely the promise of a later day. They won't be going anywhere, and hopefully, neither will I.
Basically, I only make room in order to fill up the newly allotted space. Donating a paperback to the library or trading one in at the used bookstore results in a tiny shelving gap between volumes - a gap with a shorter lifespan than most adult mayflies. And these gaps appear rarely - the vast majority of our book purchases become as familiar to our home as heirlooms or treasured dining ware. The less-loved of volumes often get transferred into cardboard boxes and stored in the gloom of the garage, thanks to some vague, half-formed theory about some future day in which we will revel in a surplus of shelving space and reading rooms, some glowing era of sophisticated urban living with a bookshelf in every corner.
I was recently thrown a bit of a lifeline in this never-ending struggle, thanks to the recommendation from a friend of mine who's waged his own battle against the tyranny of the printed word. A five-year old experiment in soft socialism, PaperBackSwap.com is a site devoted to the notion that one should only purge one's holdings in order to make room for more goods, and if this sounds even less like socialism than our own modest national nods in that direction, I should add that the only money or profit at play in PaperBackSwap is that forked over to the U.S. Post Office (which is, of course, an official Government Agency).
The idea is simple. You enter the ISBN of a book you no longer want, and the system creates a holding for that book. At the same time, you create a list of books you are interested in. Another online member may have a request for the book you've just posted. You are then obliged to send this book along to that member, courtesy of the postal service, which means you pay media mail rates - generally $2.35 or so, at least for smallish paperbacks (while the site name suggests they traffic exclusively in paperbacks, one can send along and trade any book of any size, with the understanding that shipping costs will go up a bit the larger and heavier the book). When you send your book off, you gain a credit for one book owed you. At this point, any available book you've listed as wanting will be shipped to you, free of charge, by another member (they will pay the postal charge). It's pretty simple. And for those with a large number of small paperbacks, the site even offers simple wrapping materials that comes directly from your home printer.
In the handful of weeks I've been a member of this (so far) free service, I've unloaded over a dozen unwanted or non-necessary volumes, and have gained a nice new stack of books that have long existed on a personal mental grocery list. The vast majority of these have been semi-contemporary fictional works of authors whose names have been familiar to me but whose works have not, such as :
-Edward Whittemore and The Sinai Tapestry (terrible vintage cover)
-East German writer Christa Wolf's 1984 reinterpretation of Cassandra
-Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk's Snow (a novel my mother-in-law explicitly dissuaded me from reading, but oh well....)
-South African J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (my wife recently read and enjoyed Coetzee's Disgrace, so it was time to play some catch-up)
-Michel Houellebecq's supposedly graphic and controversial The Elementary Particles (note to self and others: this book has also been translated and released as Atomised, which I only discovered after receiving a copy of each)
-Iris Murdoch's The Bell (never too late, right?)
-Joan Didion's collection of California essays, Where I Was From
-William Trevor's The Story of Lucy Gault (our recent trip to Ireland had me hungering for contemporary Irish literature)
-and critic James Wood's venture into the novelistic form, The Case Against God
That's quite a nice stack already, and no doubt I'll be shuttling some of these volumes around in boxes or between shelves in the following years, many possibly still unread, as we move along our merry way. But that's the way of things. Whereas a closet full of never-before-worn clothes is a sad and drooping sight, running the risk of burst seams from changing waistlines and the infestation of moth and mold, a shelf of unread books is merely the promise of a later day. They won't be going anywhere, and hopefully, neither will I.
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1 comment:
This is a very useful and awesome idea. I think you told me about this a while back and I totally did not understand what the premise was. I shall now register and reap the benefits. Also, the whole "Elementary Particles" / "Atomised" is probably my fault since I sent you that one. I thought you knew about the European version.
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