Rehoming books

[alicebentley]

Twenty years ago, when we moved from Chicago to Vashon, we had too little time, and enough money, that instead of weeding our collection of books (and the remnants of the bookstore) we shipped everything here.
I estimate it was about 15,000 volumes.
In 2012 we were going through a rough patch, and just the thought of having to move with So Much Stuff was panic-inducing. So I started making runs to used book stores, getting tables at conventions where I priced everything to move move move ($1 each was common), and had probably dropped to about 4,000 or so books before I ran out of energy (and panic).
Nowadays we are much more likely to buy our new books as ebooks - and while there's a core of several hundred books I will likely always keep, I am ready to find new homes for much of what's here.

So I applied for a dealer table at Norwescon. It would be my first local outing since the pandemic started, but one gets fairly good distancing by staying behind a table, and I love the bookseller experience of connecting people with books.

But they turned me down.

Faced with listing them one by one on some For Sale site (bleh) I whined about this on FB, where some folks said they would be interested in seeing a list, and one local bookseller said he'd come take a look.

I'll get around to doing it, but that table would have been nice.

Comments

[minnehaha]

What the honest f*ck?!

WHY did they turn you down? Enough booksellers and not enough anime figurines?

K.

[pameladean]

Well pfui, your table sounds like a great addition to a dealers room, but I guess they have other ideas.

We still have the 15,000 books, or the four-person equivalent. I have (well mostly) stopped buying paper books because there is nowhere to put them. We lack a panic-inducing event to provide the impetus for culling. I will start a conversation: "We don't really need ANY Piers Anthony, do we?" "Welllll, maybe just X." "And Y." "No Xanth!" "Maybe the first three?" and it all goes to pieces.

I won't even get started on the multiple editions of LoTR and how the experience of reading the one-volume edition with its Bible-paper pages is different from reading my battered paperbacks, one of which got dropped in the bathtub.

P.