Meldy, I used to have an aversion to getting rid of any book whatsoever. But that was when I lived in a three-story, 4000 sq. ft. house with another 1000 sq. ft. in the basement. Times have changed, square footage has drastically shrunk & the basement, alas, has disappeared altogether, so I had to develop another philosophy on the issue.

Now if I read a book & don't like it, or feel that it really doesn't have merit (by my own subjective opinion) i put it in a box that periodically goes to be donated to the library's used book store. Fiction that I've liked, or has an emotional attachment from childhood will stay on my shelves, probably forever. Non-fiction has to meet the criteria of "is it used." This means to I check something in the book at least every 18 months or so. If not, it will end up getting donated too.

I love old books. I've got a lot of old gardening books which, despite the frequent references to banned substances like DDT, are actually very useful. And one of DH's favorite cookbooks is one from my mother's kitchen that has a copyright date of 1939. He used it so much that the binding fell apart. I had it rebound about 10 years ago & now it's falling apart again.

I've held on to most books I've owned up until our move.

Case in point, I've saved and brought to Denmark, all the Cricket magazines I grew up on (70's through early 80's). DD reads them now and LOVES them. Most of the books we brought are children's books since it's tough to find English kids' books here and DD devours books.

The move here meant weeding out, although we did store a good amount back home.

Redundant, or too basic, gardening books went. Many cookbooks went. If I couldn't identify more than one recipe that I'd made from it then it went. Some that didn't go, but I wish had, were DH's old set of Encyclopedias. They just sit in the basement and grow mold and are currently in storage at my parents' house awaiting our return... :^P

I come from a family of serious book packrats but now I'm all for purging. Surprisingly DH, who comes from a family of clear-out-ers, wants to hold onto stuff like !!!MY GRANDPARENTS OLD NAT. GEOGRAPHICS!!! -again a dust/mold gatherer from the basement. We're going to have a serious talk when we return home 'cause I'm liking this living light of stuff that we're doing here.

Tough ones to weed out...kid books from my childhood, good gardening books, art books.

Many of us are on the ends of the spectrum of children who were taught books are sacred and part of a freedom some other cultures can't freely enjoy. I am sure that has influenced the almost holy way we hoard and preserve them. I am also a book "keeper". Due to the type of vocations I've always had, it was a necessity to keep libraries of reference materials, both in book and periodical forms.

I had a bad experience once because of purging what I thought were useless books. Nobody told me to save the textbooks from my first time around at university. Who would have ever in a million years thought that one school to which I had transferred would insist I cough up the texts to prove the level and content of the courses. Thankfully, many of them were from the first years of courses all the engineering and science students were obliged to take as prerequisites and I could borrow them from my metallurgist BIL, who also attended the same university. That gave me book purge phobia in a major way. Geeze, what does one do with years of old textbooks?

I keep a few books by my fav authors, and they are mostly poetry. One of them has some of my mother's work in it. I have a lot of the classics. Two years ago, I purged the periodicals accumulated over fifteen years. I purged old fictions. I purged the DIY books.

The inet has made info so accessible that a lot of the reference books are almost redundant. Disclaimer is there is so much bunk floating around on the inet and partial truths. Anybody can become an "expert" if they have access to webspace, and those are people who would have never found a publisher for their work in book form. So, one is obliged to be more discerning. That's why it's futile to argue issues with professional googlers. If they sit at their desks long enough they can always find a source to back up their ideas.

Space is limited here too. I love to re-read too, the second or third time, books that I truly enjoyed.
But...sometimes I just have to thin out the shelves. I always keep the reference books, no matter what the subject. If I haven't read any of the others a few years, then they go to one of the Thrift Shops.

Right now, I am going through the contents of a bottom shelf. Sheet music, Beginner Piano Books, Organ fingering exercises and solos. Vocal solos, You name it, I got it, tons of it. I don't want to get rid of a single piece of it. Some of it is so old that it's falling to pieces.

I have a copy of Silver Buckle Rag, published in 1910 that I pull out every now and then and play. They don't make 'em like they used to!

I was just talking to a woman today who runs the biggest used book sale here in town & she gave me some interesting insights to what books are totally useless under almost any circumstances in the resale market:

--Old textbooks
--Old Law books (apparently lawyers are constantly trying to donate them)
--Readers Digest Condensed books
--National Geographics

What are considered "gold" are:

--Children's books, especially the old ones like the Oz books, old (pre-1950's)Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Cherry Ames, etc., & old Golden Books in good shape
--Gardening books of almost any type
--Cookbooks & the old ones are especially valued.

Most of my books range from published in the 1890's to 1920's. I love pulp fiction from that period and the landscape books. I read "100 years of the New Your Times best seller list" which started in early 1900's. I had read almost all of them up til 1920, then read some during the '70's when I worked at a library. Since then, I have missed most of them. All the fault of my great uncle who sent me a box of books from his youth to me when I was 12.

I have finally started giving away books that I will never reread (I reread all the time). We have a used bookstore just across the street from where I work. I am in trouble.

Andie, that list reminds me: we were at our attorney's office recently, to sign paperwork following a refinance of our mortgage. He's done stuff for us since we married (wills, house purchase, etc). Himself (a former lawyer) was looking at his law books, and discussing how everything is now online with the legal publishing services.
Attorney told us he'd been offered a good price by a local decorator for the books (they're beautifully bound) for a house she was working on. He agreed and sold a load of them to her client as decoration.

So tell your friend she should pass on those text books and law books (if nicely bound) to some fancy decorators.

I was going to say that decorators use books that work in
their decor. Readers Digest books are great to use, you'd
be surprised at how many people DON'T read and don't have
books in their homes.

I'm still a sucker for old books especially cookbooks.

My mom keeps EVERYTHING - and the house is FULL of books. I don't have that kind of room.

I was a book hoarder, but currently live in a place with an excellent library. If I want it, well, it's there. I'm really lucky that way. I keep some books, but much of the fiction I read is like going to the movies. An escape for the afternoon, a good story, and likely not worth reading again. In other words, a good read for the train.

I do collect the reference types of books for the areas I'm interested in. There's some wonderful out of print pattern drafting books, tailoring, and similar out there.

I've mostly given up on cookbooks. If I suddenly desire bananas foster, I google it, and use one of the 20 zillion recipes that come up. Who needs a double shelf of cookbooks for that? When I find a really good recipe, I save that on the hard drive and print it at will. At least I don't have to make physical space for a whole book with 1 good recipe. I have my own cookbook. Annotated, edited and compiled by Moi!

I have about ten cooking books I won't part with. One is an early edition of the Joy of Cooking. It's older than I am. When my children got married, I saw to it that each one got that particular book. I had to buy more current editions, and it's still good.........but does not have the really old timey directions my edition has. Since we still cook in that style, mine is a treasure. Aside from that, my Japanese Cooking Book and my Still Meadows the rest I also Google up and choose and then copy it to my Betty Crocker program on the puter. I made a hard copy of all my favs and keep them in a binder on my Kitchen shelves. I find inevitably when I want to look something up, the dh is playing cards at the kitchen puter. LOL. Another treasure was an whole set of Gourmet Cooking Books, I believe twenty one volumes I got at a bag sale. They sold empty bags by the dollar and whatever one could cram into it cost.......one dollar. I got all twenty books into one bag and my knees buckled carrying it to the cashier. Most of it is in the French style, and they have a lot of tutorials on unusual things as creating aspic entrees and making marzipan, or how to dress wild fowl. I also still have the first cooking book I ever owned. A sweet little old lady gave me a lot of kitchen items she owned when I got married. She had to have been in her eighties. One book was entitled Aunt Sammy's Radio Recipes Revised. I can't part with that one, lol. Neither the little pamphlets printed in WWII giving housewives hints on how to make do with what they had in wartime.

Oh its easy, really, all reference books I keep,hubby still doesn't understand that we need a new bookshelf. Only the very bestest novels stay, say John Wyndham or some classics.Others get sent back to the book exchange.
The 12 year old boy gets to keep all good books, as dictated by mum, eg, black beauty, anything by Dickens of course, Colin Thiele, the great SA author,all that stuff. The 20 month old tends to rip books to shreds, so rubbish is recycled quickly, but she has some good Dr Suess, Winnie the Pooh (only the english originals, not that modern US stuff, where Tigger has a projectile chin)
Cookbooks have a separate shelf, not that I ever follow a recipe, but sometimes there are good ideas there..

Do you ever get the comment from repairmen, "You must be a teacher", or "Do you read all those?". LOL Even after heavy culling a few years ago we still moved hundreds of books. But they are my travel, my continuing education, solace and amusement. I've learned to garden from books, cook, do crewel embroidery and crochet (still amazed at what I can do with a curved stick and ball of yarn!), and so much more.

I've a shelf of art books, diaries/memoirs, novels, history plus illustrated books on India. I''ll fix curry and hot tea and wallow in the Raj period for a few days every year or so.

My fascination with India grew out of my interest in English political and social history .A few books on gardens and the early botanists and their travels led to still other books on sailing ships 'round all the continents and coaling stations on tiny ocean isles. Then to wonder how all those colonies fared...on and on. I don't want just a broad from the top historical overview, I like to read the novels or travel books written at the time. Strange to say, these type books aren't always available at my library...LOL And I'm hanging on to most I've collected.

Other keepers are like E.F.Benson's Lucia stories or Trollope's many novels, John Galsworthy's work. The library may have a few but not all, and I want to read all by a favorite author. I do read some current fiction but rarely hold on to those books, (and even more rarely do I remember the characters or plot).

My gardening books are probably less than300 but I still use them often. Taylor's Encyclopedia of Gardening in the mid 1960's was my first purchase after exhausting the library's shelves. I made notations on almost every page ...it's a 35 year record of my old garden...successes and failures. The others like Henry Mitchell and Margery Fish are like old friends Still make out wishlists from A.B.Graf's marvelous books on Tropicals...if I just had more windows!.

I culled most cookbooks, kept Joy of Cookng, James Beard, Rene Verdon on techniques, Tassajara on Veggies and Bread, Julia Child, a few community cookbooks. A few interesting like the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook which has good recipes and gossip about the many authors and artists that hung out in the Gertrude Stein salon. And LaRousse Gastronomique which my Mom bought for me when I finally started cooking in my forties...LOL Actually, it's an interesting read, but I don't use it for recipes.

Whew! But I do love books! josh

Josh, Aren't the Lucia books wonderful? I discovered them about 30 years ago & practically ripped through them all laughing all the way.

And Suzy, DH loves the Time-Life series of world cooking. We found the whole set at a used book sale about 20 years ago. There is an illustrated hard cover book for each country/region with tons of full color pictures of the dishes & then an accompanying spiral book for each hard cover volume with recipes. These books have been just about used to death.

Andie, E.F.Benson wrote lots of other books, which naturally I had to read, including an interesting autobiography. Did you know he lived in Henry James' old house, and later it was occupied by Rumer Godden. This was the Mapp house later bought by Lucia...LOL I've seen pics of the steep cobbled street leading up to the baywindow. No, I'm not really a groupie but there IS a Tilling Society I found on the web...LOL
I think it was my first year on GW that I mentioned the Lucia books and two or three years afterward would get occasional emails from another fan who was reading old posts. Part of the reason I knew I'd found my "home" here at GW. josh

Have kept all my Golden books from the late 40s that weren't lost when our house burned in the early 60s, all my nursing textbooks, a few of my other college books, a few classics, some of my favorite fiction books, a few veterinarian and medical books copywritten in the late 1800s and early 1900s, two math books from the late 1800s and a small number of them from the early 1900s. Only have 5 or so cookbooks - don't do much of that any more. DH just can't understand why all the bookcases are full and the fact that there is a large flat box full of books under one of the spare beds!! I read at night to turn off the day issues and be able to sleep, so light reading is kept handy. Of course all my gardening books and special articles out of gardening magazines are kept. Thanks for the hint on the Condensed Reader Digest books as I have a few that were published in the 50s and 60s that were my aunt's and they need a home. Packrats - who us?

Mary