We are commonly said to live in a throwaway society. Despite growing knowledge of the environmental costs of the disposable mindset, we only seem to be getting more that way. Many people routinely eat off of disposable plates to save a few minute of dishwashing. Clothes are thrown away after hardly being worn. Bicycles that need only minor repairs are discarded. Millions of people daily pay good money for water bottled in disposable containers, in the belief that tap water (all most bottled water really is) from somewhere else is somehow better than their own. Consumer electronics and computer systems are now mostly treated as disposable, thanks to aggressive policies of planned obsolescence. Our society is built on waste, and most of us seem to have no problem at all with this.

But most people make an exception when it comes to books. A person who will casually throw away half a dozen drink containers a day will hoard old books as if getting rid of them was a crime. People just can’t bear to throw them away, be they ever so tattered or dusty or outdated.

A lot of them end up for sale in used book, antique, and thrift stores. Browsing through the old books at these places is a favorite pastime of mine. One never knows what one might find. I have seen books on subjects I never even knew existed. Other books preserve snapshots of public attitudes toward various subjects in times past. Some have been personalized, with book plates, names and addresses written on flyleaves, and even dedications. I have books with Christmas dedications from giver to recipient that go back to the 1930s. An anthology of poems on my shelf contains extensive comments about the editor and his daughter from a previous owner who knew them and thought highly of them.

When I browse through old books I keep an eye out for items that I recall from my childhood. I’ve found dozens of these over the years. Happening across these old literary friends during a browse is much more fun than looking them up at online retailers. It is also the only way to find a book for which one has vivid childhood memories but cannot remember an author or title! Old books, if they are still presentable, also make good gifts for the readers in one’s life.

Working at a public library, I see a lot of old books. Space constraints make it necessary to weed through the collection now and then to get rid of items that are worn out or no longer being used. The library also gets lots (and lots and lots!) of donations. People who care enough about books to get them in the first place can’t bear to put them in the trash. They have to give them away to someone, in the hope that maybe, just maybe, the books can still find a good home.

Once in a blue moon we get a donated item that makes a potentially useful addition to the library’s collection. For example, we take all the J.K. Rowling books we can get and stockpile them for replacements, since they have a way of getting lost when we lend them out. My predecessors in the days when the library was starved of funds added large numbers of old textbooks to our shelves, in hopes that they might fill gaps in the collection. I’ve found that they just aren’t worth bothering with.

Most of what we get we try offering for sale in our Friends of the Library room. We make them available for fire-sale prices like a thrift store. In a small town where there are no bookstores nearby, we are the book source. Despite our efforts to let people know, few seem to be aware that we have them. I keep a couple of book trucks full of material out in the main library area where they can be seen by people passing by. Sometimes that gets people into the Friends Room.

A great deal of what is donated is not really much use to anybody. I’ve seen a small pickup truck load of books that consisted of an ancient set of encyclopedias, a dozen or more equally elderly volumes of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and assorted novels by formerly popular authors whom few now living probably recognize. Just this morning we got a box full of worn textbooks on forestry—of interest to a specialist collector, perhaps, but no use to anyone around here.

A lot of the material is newer, of course. We get heaps of mystery and thriller paperbacks, even bigger heaps of romance novels, and piles of hardcover fiction, some of it fairly recent. We get quite a bit of recent nonfiction too. Almost all of it is either inspirational, money-related, or deals with dieting and fitness. Since interest in these subjects tends to be rather faddish, we don’t sell very many of these shiny, barely-read volumes. Somehow we have vastly more nonfiction donated than we ever sell. But we do get lucky now and then. Once in a while somebody wants some old textbooks or dictionaries, or will buy an old set of encyclopedias, or will get a yearbook as a birthday present so that somebody can see what was happening in the world the year he or she was born. Older inspirational books find buyers now and then as well. I’m not sure we have ever sold a diet or money management book, though.
A book fiend of wide-ranging interests can find lots of interesting stuff. I’ve found a book on World War I poison gas technology published in 1920 (my military history buff brother liked that one), a 1960 Boy Scout guide, the occasional interesting poetry anthology, a recent work about the peopling of prehistoric America, a fascinating work by Edith Hamilton on classical Greek thought, an anthology of O. Henry stories—I could go on. I wish I had time to read everything of interest that I spot.

It is sometimes hard, when looking over a batch of books from a single donor, to avoid speculating as to what they may say about the donor. Why did this woman find it necessary to buy and read five or six hundred romance paperbacks? Why is it that so many of them show settler women being ravished by Indian braves on the cover? Perhaps you sometimes learn too much about someone from their discarded books…. And you can always tell the smokers; a recent batch of donated paperbacks stank so badly of stale tobacco that I had to throw the whole thing away.

Not long ago we got a big donation of mostly newish-looking books. No fewer than fourteen of them were diet books. As many as a dozen were about money management, mostly dealing specifically with ways to get out of debt. Then there were great gobs of inspirational and self-help material. I felt kind of sad looking over this batch. The impression I got was of a reader unhappy with a lot of things in her life, wanting to change but having little idea how. Perhaps buying and reading books had become a substitute for making the hard choices required in taking serious, committed action. I don’t know any of this for certain of course. But it makes me wonder.

Perhaps this is why we do not like to throw away books. Books serve as receptacles of thought. Every book carries in it the stamp of an author with an idea, great or small, profound or silly. Those who bought and read these books did so because these ideas meant something to them. Old books were a part of someone once, in a way that disposable bottles and old computer monitors never were.

But space is tight, and they can’t be held onto forever. When I first went to work here I scarcely ever threw out old books. I rearranged shelving in the Friends Room and in the back office area to maximize the number of books we kept. But over time the number of books has kept mounting, faster than we can sell them.

Some surplus books I give to the local food bank. They hand them out to clients who want to read but (obviously) can’t afford to buy their own material. The food bank takes all the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and children’s books (which we don’t have donated too often) that we can give them. Since they are church-affiliated we have to be very careful in giving them fiction—romance novels are out, Star Trek paperbacks and old Perry Mason novels are acceptable. We have also donated books to a local nursing home’s in-house library, and to a tiny town thirty miles from here which recently started their own public library.

But some of the books just have to go. I try to limit this treatment to books that are badly worn and tattered, or which have failed to sell for an extended period even after being marked down to twenty-five cents. When I do give books the File Thirteen treatment, I take great care to put them in the dumpster when nobody is looking, and then only when there is enough trash there to cover them up. Some people get very funny ideas about libraries discarding books. I’ve heard stories from other librarians about getting in trouble for disposing of quite hopelessly nasty old material. It’s best to be discreet.

It’s also not something I’m proud of doing. I’m a lifelong book lover myself. I hate to see books discarded. Even though I know full well that we can’t save everything, I get a little sentimental about them when I don’t watch myself. Old books just have a way of getting hold of a person.