In our Colorado house, we had so many books. There were fourteen bookshelves, each about seven feet high, scattered throughout the house. And every one of them was completely filled, including double-stacking of paperbacks. Thousands upon thousands of books. It was glorious.
Before we moved to Montana, we agreed to get rid of a lot of the books. Frankly, we just weren’t going to read some of them again. And also frankly, both Pepper and I generally read e-books these days, so physical books aren’t as useful. We gathered boxes and boxes of books and donated them to the Longmont Public Library, Goodwill, and ARC. I think we probably gave away nearly two-thirds of our collection.
Still, we had a couple dozen boxes of books that we packaged, hauled to Montana, and stuffed into a closet. We kept telling ourselves “we’ll unpack them one of these days”.
Today was that day.
That single bookshelf in the conservatory has nearly all of my books. (You can’t tell in this photo, but it’s double-sided, so there are actually twice as many books.) It’s a little sad that I whittled down my collection to this. But these are the books that I might read again someday.
Pepper is busy unboxing her collection and putting them into several bookshelves elsewhere in the house. Despite telling me I needed to be more aggressive about giving away “my” books, I can’t help but notice she’s kept more than I did…
In any case, it’s nice to have books out again. Despite the convenience of e-books, there’s something special about a good old paperback.