No, I’m not bulimic. Â I’ve been wanting to declutter the basement some and I’m also trying to follow the ‘get one new thing, get rid of something else’ school of home maintenance. Â Last night we went to Home Depot and Lee Valley to get gardening stuff and as a result, I’m getting rid of an approximately equal number of books. Â We bought 16 packages of seeds yesterday. Â The strawberries alone constituted roughly 216 seeds so I have some work to do.My great-uncle Bill is something of a packrat. Â Not quite clinically so but he was told by the Toronto Fire Safety officials and his insurance company that either he needed to get some of the stuff out of his house or he would get kicked out. Â He had about 5 boxes (and large ones) of pulp sci-fi and fantasy from about 1935-1975. Â None of it was his. Â He was storing it for a friend and the friend never came around for it so my dad got all of it.
Those of you who know my folks know how many books they have. Â This influx of new old books pushed them to drastically remodel the basement in order to fit them all in (besides the voluminous VHS and DVD libraries). Â Part of the process was going through all of the boxes and weeding out duplicates. Â This resulted in me being second (or third or fourth) handed around 150 books. Â Some of these have titles like “The Killer Thing,” “The Humanoids” and “The Girls from Planet 5.” Â Oddly, many of these no-doubt classic works of fine literature do not inspire me with feelings of unmixed delight. Â Tonight as we watched David Tennant portraying Dr. Who rather brilliantly, I sat next to the bookshelf and sorted. Â I have around and about 100 books in a stack (more of a heap at this point, really) on the floor beside me. Â These did not pass my none-too-scrupulous “do I think I’m ever going to read this” test. Â The remainder have been entered into my Libra library (as discussed earlier). Â Not all of the discards are from Uncle Bill. Â I have for some time had a habit of wandering into used bookstores and just buying a stack of what seems like a good idea at the time. Â Probably a quarter of what is leaving came from this camp. Â The bookshelves are starting to look a little sparse. Â I think I should plant some strawberries in them to fill the space.