I confess to drooling every time I see this image.https://t.co/qj0FqVsFTl
— Michael Robinson (@michaelrperth) January 16, 2022
Admittedly, because I’m (mildly) OCD as well as ADHD, I fantasize about organizing all those books in those lovely, lovely rooms…
… If you spend enough time in the literary corners of Twitter, this image may look familiar. It rises again just about annually, and the library has been attributed over the years to authors including Umberto Eco and buildings in Italy and Prague. As with other images featuring beautiful bookshelves, people go absolutely bananas for it. Mr. Winslow’s post received 1,700 comments, including one from a professor at Pace University who has been using the photo as his Zoom background…
The library, it should be known, is not in Europe. It doesn’t even exist anymore. But when it did, it was the home library of Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Richard Macksey in Baltimore. (I was his student in 2015 and interviewed him for Literary Hub in 2018.) Dr. Macksey, who passed away in 2019, was a book collector, polyglot and scholar of comparative literature. At Hopkins, he founded one of the country’s first interdisciplinary academic departments and organized the 1966 conference “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” which included the first stateside lectures by the theorists Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Paul de Man.
Dr. Macksey’s book collection clocked in at 51,000 titles, according to his son, Alan, excluding magazines and other ephemera. A decade ago, the most valuable pieces — including first editions of “Moby Dick,” T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock and Other Observations,” and works by Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley — were moved to a “special collections” room on the Hopkins campus. After Dr. Macksey’s death, a S.W.A.T. team-like group of librarians and conservationists spent three weeks combing through his book-filled, 7,400-square-foot house to select 35,000 volumes to add to the university’s libraries.
Surprise discoveries included an 18th-century Rousseau text with charred covers (found in the kitchen), a “pristine” copy of a rare 1950s exhibition catalog showing Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings, posters from the May 1968 protests when students in Paris occupied the Sorbonne, a hand-drawn Christmas card from the filmmaker John Waters, and the original recordings of the theorists at that 1966 structuralism conference…
Dammit, the man needed an obsessive librarian!
debbie
I agree, Anne Laurie. It is kind of sloppy. And how to keep up with the dusting? ?.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I used to have tons of physical books, and I did organize them. The literary ones were in order of date of publication, frex. At this point though, I used mostly e-books. I have only two book cases of physical books. They are still organized. Most fiction on my right. History, biography, adult fantasy, books about writing and other on my left.
germy
There’s a bookstore near us that I love to visit:
https://www.saratoga.com/business/lyrical-ballad-bookstore-4261/
An ancient building with room after room after room full of books.
Every time I visit I end up buying a 19th century 1st edition of something or another
EDIT: I haven’t been there since covid. I hope to return soon.
OzarkHillbilly
@debbie: Dusting? Where do people keep their dust collections if not with their book collections?
Baud
I too used to love books when I was younger.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone ???
rikyrah
While that library does make me ??
I also want historian Michael Beschloss’ library. Has a ladder and everything ??
OzarkHillbilly
My wife swears my book shelves look just like Macksey’s library. Been on me for years to get rid of some of them. There are a few I could do to part with but for the most part I pass books “I can part with” on to others as soon as I’m done with them and just keep the ones I might reread some day, and most of those I already have reread at least once.
debbie
@OzarkHillbilly:
Heh. Wish my allergies agreed.
Baud
The problem with books is that there is always another one. It’s impossible to finish them all.
Phylllis
Hubby and I pared down our book collections when we moved to our new home 3+ years ago & agreed to not rebuild it. I have not been able to keep to that agreement, although I do replenish the nearest little free library every few months.
sab
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Lol, adult fantasy isn’t fiction?
Phylllis
@Baud: Right. You have your ‘I’m gonna read that one right away’ books, your ‘that goes in the to read soon’ stack, neither of which should be confused with the emergency back up book stash.
raven
I just found a program from the 1983 Liberty Bowl to add to my sports library !!!
lao hong han
@OzarkHillbilly:
ikr? i have dust bunnies which have been under my bookshelves long enough to evolve the opposable thumb!
geg6
@rikyrah:
Yes! Every time I see him on tv in that room, I am filled with envy.
One of the best things that came from this pandemic for me was my John building me some built in bookshelves for our bonus room. Three shelves stretching the width of the room (18 feet). That’s where I work when I WFH. And it makes for a great zoom background.
rikyrah
???
Veronica McDonald? (@Purify_toast17) tweeted at 0:54 AM on Sun, Jan 16, 2022:
You know what? Trump’s latest lie of “affirmative action for covid treatment” will work because it allows white people to shirk their responsibility. They’re not suffering from covid because they refuse to get the vax; they’re suffering b/c THE BLACKS™️ are taking their spots.
(https://twitter.com/Purify_toast17/status/1482607260073439235?t=dye76my2JOcb9_0cHhtkag&s=03)
Dorothy A. Winsor
@sab: It is, but I don’t have room for it in the right-hand bookcase.
I know it makes people cringe, but I throw books away if I don’t like them.
OTOH, if I really like an e-book, I then often buy the paperback to keep.
Matt McIrvin
Having a child was a real turning point for us– when we moved to our current house, our giant book collections ended up in boxes in the basement and we never took most of them out. Over a decade later we finally got rid of most of them.
I also found that I just didn’t read like I used to, apart from children’s books–I’d accumulate physical books and never getting around to reading them. Switching mostly to e-books was the thing that got me reading for pleasure regularly again. I resisted that for a long time because of a kind of bibliophile snobbery. But if I wasn’t reading, what was the point?
Baud
@sab:
I thought adult fantasy referred to political Twitter.
OzarkHillbilly
@lao hong han: What do you feed them? Mine are particularly fond of millet and oats.
Immanentize
I am about to embark on a big book reduction project at my house — two medium (5×3) and two tall bookcases (7×3) bookcases in the lvgrm, 2 medium bookcases in my bedroom, two medium bookcases in the guest room, one medium in the upstairs hallway, one medium in the Immp’s old bedroom, two smaller bookcases in the Immp’s new attic bedroom, two medium bookcases in the entry hallway near the kitchen and — oh yeah — three big bookcases in the basement. But in a year or two I want to move….
Help!
Matt I. above just reminded me of the boxes of mostly children’s books and mysteries set aside for the Immp in the attic…. Ugh.
sab
I have mine down to 3 bookcases, which creates a problem for what to do with the stuffed animals that used to sit on top. I can’t get rid of them, as that would be murdering old friends some of whom go back 65 years.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Immanentize: Bite the bullet and throw a bunch of them away
Immanentize
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I’ll give them to the local library (new building!) For their fabulous book and bake sales. But it is hard for me to Marie Kondo books. And no, I am not much of a hoarder…
sab
@Immanentize: What do all those books do structurally to the house? That’s a lot of weight.
I suggest get cracking. My college professor sister is retiring this year, and they just bought a condo to downsize into. I don’t think she has ever thrown away a book in her life. Now it is urgent because the realtor wants to buy her house, and the house is odd enough that she may never find another buyer even in this market.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Immanentize: Sadly, my local library doesn’t have a Friends of the Library organization any more, so they don’t do the used book sale.
JPL
@debbie: I agree with you. I sneeze just looking at that.
Baud
I had an original edition Black Beauty I got rid of because I oppose CRT.
Ryan
7400 square foot house? 7400 square feet???!!!?!?111
Hoppie
Very proud Hopkins alum checking in. Thanks for this! Never had a class from Prof. Macksey, but spent many thousands of hours buried (it is mostly underground) in the main campus library. Good memories.
Over the years my wife and I have pared the accumulated books as we prepared to leave the 6,000 sq. ft. house in Lexington for what is eventually a 3/4ers smaller condo in San Diego. Along the way 39 boxes went to a library book sale; when we got home, we wondered where they had come from? Seemed as big a hoard as ever.
Big task this spring is to go back to Lex to clear out the 15 x 20 storage locker, and reduce the pile to indispensables. As if.
Starfish
@rikyrah: One of the people I knew in Baltimore renovated their house and made this giant multistory bookshelf with a ladder. I was so jealous.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud:
Umberto Eco has said that a library should be aspirational.
Cermet
Was on a book buying spree about two years ago – all technical/math/physics books but needed various sections from many different topics to study – so 90% of any given book was of no interest. So now I have a small wall full (built a large book case in my home office) and wouldn’t let even one go – even dug out a few that I had in the attic. There is no greater comfort then sitting in a room with a case full of useful books that one is familiar with – better yet, a few I might even read completely, once I retire.
E.
At my house, books are measured in linear feet. About 450 currently. And yes I have Macksey and Donato’s The Structuralist Controversy, referred to in the article. It is poorly printed unfortunately. Tiny type, poor quality paper and glue. The best articles, Derrida’s in particular, can be found elsewhere in easier to read volumes.
The Fat Kate Middleton
@Dorothy A. Winsor: One of the most heartstopping moments of my life occurred when my husband told me of an “interesting” book sale he’d come across in a small town near us. I went there immediately, and found an old two story garage filled from top to bottom with books – brand new, never-read books. A friend of the the town’s library was a semi truck driver who was asked to find a place to dump all the books that made up the contents of a big city bookstore that had gone out of business. The driver knew his small town library was trying to fundraise for a new building, and wondered if they might want the books. When I arrived, the sale had just begun – one plastic grocery store bag going for three dollars. I ended up making four trips to fill up my car, spending $135 for $4000 worth of books. I purchased complete new class sets for my AP classes, as well as birthday/Christmas/special occasion gifts for my book loving family and friends. I still swoon thinking of it.
satby
@Immanentize: Little free libraries are a good place especially for kids and young adult books; also lots of libraries take unwanted books for their book sales, which are a badly needed fundraiser.
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I’m amazed your complex doesn’t have a book sharing bookcase somewhere. Even our farmers market has one. Just because you didn’t like it doesn’t mean no one would enjoy it. There’s several Little Free Libraries around here, I drive around and drop off books to them, none are farther than a mile away. They have maps that let you know where in your local area they are.
NotMax
In case it hasn’t already been mentioned, FYI.
Omnes Omnibus
I think that it would be hard to have too many books or albums/CDs. One might need to find/hear something from any one of them at any time. Or, more importantly, one might want to. Also, they shouldn’t be too organized because half of the fun is searching through them for what you want and finding something you had forgotten about. Some organization is fine, like “the history books are all over there” because I am not a complete monster. Additionally, yes, I do recognize the inherent contradiction between my two main point, but I am okay with that for I contain multitudes.
geg6
@NotMax:
Looks like they didn’t send their best. Imagine that. What dimwits.
geg6
@Omnes Omnibus:
I like mine all jumbled up, too. The only exception is if the books are a series, like Harry Potter or Perlstein’s histories on conservatism/GQP. Those must be shelved together.
OzarkHillbilly
Truer words (for me anyway) have never been spoken. That happens every time I go looking for a book. Then I have to figure which one I’m going to read first.
satby
@Omnes Omnibus: I feel so seen by this comment!
Jeffro
I used to have a ton of bookcases everywhere, holding hundreds of books I’d read over the years, but two moves ago I decided to thin things out quite a bit. I mean, how many books am I going to ever re-read anyway?
So, now I’ve got about 20 books on the ‘re-read someday’ shelf, about 30 new (or new to me, anyway) on the ‘to-read’ shelf, about 15 on my ‘work-related/reference’ shelf…and a small bookcase in the basement with all my fave paperbacks (mostly sci-fi, horror, and fantasy). Most everything I read now goes out to friends, relatives, the used bookstore, or Goodwill. It’s a good system!
NotMax
@geg6
Indeed.
We need a new internet shorthand. I didn’t quite LOL but did LUMB at that story. Laugh Under My Breath.
;)
JML
That was one of the best parts of buying a house for me: more room to put up bookcases. The Billy from IKEA is a respectable one and I was able to easily assemble a huge corner unit with 2 of the full size and two of the half size and toppers to add additional shelving going all the way up to the ceiling. I’m mostly fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, and mysteries primarily), plus rpg books, my old law books, and a growing collection of history and biography.
satby
@NotMax: Not dumb, entitled. Convinced by the “virtue” of their cause, they honestly thought they had a right to break in, ransack, and then be given assistance in locating items they lost.@geg6:
charluckles
My wife and I are both avid readers, but she is a book collector and I am not.
I see that room, and I think hoarder.
Omnes Omnibus
@geg6: That falls under I Am Not A Monster. OTOH, there are 19 books piled (three separate piles) on my desk as I type this.
MomSense
@Immanentize:
It’s so hard to do. I did a big book purge last summer and I had to sort several times until the save pile didn’t tower over the give away pile.
The frustrating thing is that there aren’t many places that take used books.
My dad’s library is one of my favorite places in the world. Last winter I spent a weekend there with my oldest. In the evenings he lit a fire in the wood stove and he took turns reading and playing guitar while I took turns knitting and reading. There may have been bourbon.
Omnes Omnibus
@charluckles: My father got a sweatshirt at Christmas that said “It’s not hoarding if it’s books.”
NotMax
Heck, I’ve still got, stashed in closets, unopened shipping cartons filled with books which I brought along when moved here almost 40 years ago.
sab
Our neighborhood little free library is periodically vandalized, probably by neighborhood teens. Probably older than teens, because I suspect alchohol is involved. They break the plexiglass window and throw all the books in the creek. It has happened at least 4 times that I have noticed.
They are probably anti-vaxxers also. It never hurts to speculate.
satby
@Dorothy A. Winsor: a neighboring library probably does. Barrington is a wealthy area, but suburbs nearby aren’t quite as flush.
Benw
Pro tip, my dudes: if you’re carrying a very full, open, gallon milk jug and you try to free up a hand by wedging it between your arm and body, you’re going to end up with liquid all over your shirt and floor. HTH, excelsior!
SiubhanDuinne
@sab:
Also, they voted for TFG, and they believe Hillary drinks the blood of children in pizzeria basements.
sab
Anymore I only buy e-books that all fit nicely onto my Nook. Rarely if I really love a book and intend to reread it I will get it in hardcopy, but always preceded by a stint on the Nook.
Exception children’s book with pictures, and the rare times I get a graphic novel
ETA I do miss leafing through a book. It’s nearly impossible to do with an e-book.
satby
@sab: Still worth doing. I’m going to try to get a grant for one in an underserved area near the little village where my oldest son has a second home on a small lake. That village doesn’t even have a library.
satby
@SiubhanDuinne: is your power back on? You doing ok?
Charluckles
@Omnes Omnibus:
Ha. I’m going to need to find one for my wife.
cope
@Baud: I’m with you, CRTs suck, only flat screens in our house.
satby
@MomSense: I guess I’m lucky. There are several used book stores, resale stores, Little Free Libraries, share programs, and regular libraries all taking used books around here. The only books I’ve ever had to throw away have been ones chewed up by puppies.
sab
@satby: I agree. Ten months out of the year it is functional, and people do use it. We are at least three miles away from the nearest branch libraries, which is really too far for kids or young moms at home to go spur of the moment.
MomSense
@sab:
The little free library in my neighborhood is so frustrating. There are some controlling neighbors who police what goes in to the point where no one takes any of the books. The inventory hasn’t changed in months.
Subsole
@NotMax:
The sheer au-diddlydang-dacity…
satby
Speaking of books, I finished Mycroft Holmes, by Kareem Abdul Jabbar a day or so ago. And as a lover of all things Holmesian, I really enjoyed it. Very well done, so I bought the other two in the series. I hope he writes more.
Another Scott
I’ve still got too many books from college, and have accumulated many more since. Our county library system isn’t taking donations during the pandemic. The Little Free Libraries are full. A few years ago I took a bunch to a huge Better World Books donation bin, but it’s hard to see how they don’t get destroyed in the fall and the jumble. Maybe they just pulp all of them…
It’s kinda sad, but life marches on…
Cheers,
Scott.
Subsole
@OzarkHillbilly: Yep. It’s like the analog version of a wiki-walk.
satby
@MomSense: oh, that’s too bad. Is there a community center where you can suggest a sharable bookcase?
Edit: and because I’m a rebellious beyotch, I would go “borrow” most of the stock under cover of darkness and replace it with books I am ready to pass on anyway. And right wing vanity books go straight to recycling bins.
NotMax
Speaking of community lending libraries, a novel program in one Brazilian city.
sab
@MomSense: During early Covid they switched from books to food, so it was the Little Neighborhood Open Pantry. Only the snacks got eaten. The healthy food in cans just sat there., but nobody dumped them in the creek. It’s back to books now.
It is in a little neighborhood park called Karona Park. How weird is that? Back in the early sixties if a developer wanted to build a housing development they had to put in a little park with swings and a basketball court. Ours even has a tennis court and I have never seen anyone play tennis, but it’s a good place for toddlers to romp. Smooth surface, and the fence keeps them from falling into the creek.
realbtl
Not an option for everyone but here in MT I have found the reservations are always hungry for books.
WaterGirl
@Benw: oh dear.
Omnes Omnibus
@realbtl: Okay, that I could get behind. Maybe I’ll put it in my will.
MomSense
@satby:
I have made a few midnight missions to swap out books and get rid of some of the horrible right wing shit. No one needs Jonah Goldberg’s drivel.
I always say “mischief managed” when I finish.
I’m convinced the library police are the same people who keep voting against bee hives for our neighborhood garden.
mvr
@Omnes Omnibus:
About 15 years ago Jenny organized our books and since then I have had a hard time finding what I am looking for. At the time it felt like having part of my brain erased.
I’m somewhat of a book hoarder, but not terminally so. One reason I can’t retire is that my office has a few thousand philosophy books in it and I would not have room for them at home. Home has thousands more on woodworking, old house repair, genuine old house-building and carpentry books, vacuum tube audio, flyfishing, fly rod building, boatbuilding, bird identification, blacksmithing, patternmaking and machine shop work, old Mark Twain volumes, an old edition of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (flea market find!), Art history, mysteries, fiction, Rock’n’Roll, instrument making and what I think of as lost technical knowledge.
Some evidence that I’m not a pathological book hoarder. We’re having much of our foundation replaced and I’ve spent the last 3 to 4 weeks moving things out of the basement. This included a few hundred old radio books that I do think I need to let go of. I’m getting old and I likely won’t be repairing too many tube radios and in any case I still have the core books to help me in other places.
As for dust, yes, there is that. But barrister bookcases w the glass doors help if I could only afford enough of them.
bemused senior
@sab: we had to put a couple of additional foundation pillars under our bookcase wall when we moved into this house.
MomSense
@sab:
Tennis is such a nice sport. My kids took tennis lessons with the Parks and Rec program. I recently watched the biopic about the Williams family and they learned to play at the local, public tennis courts. It’s too bad the courts aren’t being used.
In my town the developers had to p it in soccer fields which are really nice for dogs and kids to play in.
Miss Bianca
@Matt McIrvin: I’ve been looking at e-readers but haven’t wanted to be tied to what Kindle or Nook decides I can have access to. Since my particular friend D is a software developer, he’s turned me onto these Pine readers and telephones, which are Linux/Open Source-based, and which are in development stage now. I am saving up my $ for this one – by the time my fund is ready, I think they’ll be on beyond the Beta stage:
https://pine64.com/product-category/tablets/pinenote/
mvr
In Nebraska and Iowa Planned Parenthood has an annual booksale (nowadays around Des Moines – before the two state’s merged one was here in Lincoln). I don’t know how widespread that practice is around the country but it might be one way to “de-access” one’s book collection.
Emma from Miami
*raises hand and bounces like a 5 year old in a sugar rush* me, me, me! I even have a LIS degree from the Dark Ages when paper was important!
oldster
@Ryan:
Yeah, 7400 sqft is an obscenely big house.
That’s the kind of thing that gives people the wrong impression of academics. This guy was independently wealthy; most of us scrape along in genteel poverty, where the genteel is an aspiration and the poverty is a fact.
Sure Lurkalot
I have about 15 feet of filled book shelves in the basement, another couple of shelves full in my office, stacks here and there and a couple of boxes full. I do need to whittle. We have a used bookstore here called Bookies which is a great place to offload. A good friend’s niece just bought it from the peeps that have owned it for decades.
Anyone ever been to Hay on Wye in Wales? It’s supposedly the used book capital of the world. It’s a cool little town with nice walks (and fishing of course).
WereBear
@rikyrah: Gotta have a ladder. And a skylight.
schrodingers_cat
If you are in Western MA check out the Book Mill
NotMax
@Omnes Omnibus
Same held true, in spades, for thumbing through the card catalog at the library.
Miss Bianca
@NotMax: My gob, it is smacked.
How can you find something to be so infuriating and yet funny as hell at the same time?
germy
https://www.readingeagle.com/2022/01/13/teens-come-out-for-newly-created-kutztown-banned-book-club/
zhena gogolia
That image fills me with anxiety.
zhena gogolia
@NotMax: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
White privilege in action
Miss Bianca
@MomSense: When my sister died and I went up to Maine to help my niece with the house-clearing, I was put in charge of the books. Oh my Lord, the books. Sis had so, so many – even more than I did. She was an artist with very catholic tastes in research material, so in addition to art books and catalogs she had books on mythology and religion and spirituality and history and literature and poetry and politics and social theory covering cultures and countries from all over the world. I kept snagging some for my personal library and then realizing how much it was going to cost to ship them back – hard winnowing on that pile.
And all those boxes of books I packed – forty or fifty at least, I lost count – went to the Goodwill in Biddeford. I didn’t weep, but came damn close a couple times.
Layer8Problem
That sounds relevant to my interests.
I’ve very much wanted to do more with e-readers, for obvious portability reasons, but I’ve never been able to make the jump. I have an early Kindle on a shelf somewhere, but after a determined try in the end I just found it frustrating; the contrast against the ink on the field of a page and the tactile pleasure of a solid book bugged me. I tried an iPad at work for technical documentation but I found I was still using wider desktop screens, and remembering the days when outfits like IBM and DEC would bury you in bookshelves-worth of paper as part of the licensing fee and one could take a pile home and educate oneself about a system in a long soak in the bathtub with the stack next to you. I was weird.
sab
@MomSense: I am so old that I remember when the parks department had rec programs. Most of my friends had their first job there. My 70 year old husband lived in his neighborhood park as a child.
debbie
@NotMax:
Unbelievable!
They found the 1993 WTC bomber because he tried to get his deposit back from the truck rental company. ??♀️
oldgold
First editions? Their special value has puzzled me ever since spousal unit 2 or 3 paid a premium at an auction for a first edition trashy romance novel – “Nothing Says Sexy Like a Court Ordered Paternity Test”’ by Phil Anders. Why is a first edition worth more than the 49th edition?
Ceci n est pas mon nym
When they comb through my collection they’re going to find a lot of cheap paperback sci fi from the 70s. It’s a beloved collection but somehow I don’t see librarians getting all gushy over it. Or my kids.
Suzanne
I haven’t been reading as much as I’d like since the pandemic started, because the constant sense of dread and the doomscrolling really elevated me, in a not-good way. It’s also really hard with the toddler around to get quiet. I love it, though. I have three of the IKEA Besta bookshelves full, and am starting a fourth. I will confess that I did the rainbow arrangement, which I really do find easier, since I always remember what color my books are. I mean, I could tell you that the first five Baby Sitters Club books were pastel yellow, pink, mint green, kind of an orangey-tan color, and pastel blue. And I had those in the 80s and I was in elementary school and I gave the whole series away decades ago.
I will note that if you have many big art books, as I do, the Besta bookshelves are superior to the Billy, as they are deeper and the shelves are sturdier.
raven
@sab: My undgrad is in Parks and Rec and Masters in Leisure Studies. I spent 20 years running municipal sports programs.
opiejeanne
@Ryan: The house across the street from mine is over 17,000 square feet. Yes, I didn’t add an extra “0” by mistake, 17k. Their guest house is bigger than my house-house.
They’ve been trying for 3 years to sell it, with nary an offer because the price is high.
It sits on 7 acres, and is positioned on the lot so that you’d never guess it was that big: 6 bedrooms, an office, an indoor pool, a gym, a basketball half-court, a huge basement full of bookcases, and a walk-in gun safe.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@mvr: I struggle with old computer books and college textbooks of all kinds. Nobody is going to need a FORTRAN IV book any more, not even a more recent Intel assembly language manual. Yet at a certain point those things get to feel historic.
So yeah, probably I’m a hoarder.
If your reaction to “I’m out of shelf space” is “I need more shelves” instead of “I need fewer books”, is that a bad sign?
Layer8Problem
This, a thousand times this. One can’t flip through and catch a glimpse of something relevant to what you’re searching for, or some serendipitous thing you missed.
NotMax mentioned card catalogs above. The stuff you’d see, the weird things that sprang up in trying to locate some volume. I’m a tech person, I appreciate the speed, the efficiency, the utility of an online catalog. I’m also probably ADHD and interested in too damned much, and I loved finding something totally off the main path and one just can’t get that now. Titles and authors’ names on spines of books in libraries and bookstores are all very well, but the cards in the card catalog told you so much more.
MomSense
@Miss Bianca:
When I moved from my farm in K’Port I also brought many boxes of books to that Goodwill. I taught in Biddeford for many years.
raven
@opiejeanne: And you’re in California?
zhena gogolia
@Layer8Problem: The loss of card catalogues is a tragedy. The cards in the Yale library catalogue had hand inscriptions from centuries past, with valuable information that could be found nowhere else.
lowtechcyclist
Our library didn’t have its annual used book sale in 2020 or 2021, and right now 2022 isn’t looking so good either.
Back in the summer of 2020, I boxed up several boxes worth of books to save for what I assumed would be the 2021 sale. I’m starting to wonder whether I should throw them away, or what.
mrmoshpotato
BOOKS! Check ’em out!
mvr
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Is “it depends” an answer. I think of libraries as places one can look stuff up when you want to know something, not just to keep stuff you will read again.
I do read in my older books, but they are there partly for when I am trying to fix something and I want to know how one does this or that thing. I once went way down a rabbit hole about trying to figure out how they made the crystaline finishes on old national steel guitars. I never did get completely to the bottom of how to replicate those, but I did get to talk to one of the Dopyera cousins who had worked in the shop as a kid, and send some information to someone writing a book about those guitars. And it led to the interesting factoid that cellulose film for movies and lacquer for cars and metal objects dovetailed insofar as both used nitrocellulose and this spurred lots of research on finish technology which was thin killed off when WWII hit and chemists concentrated their research on explosives and such. Needless to say I still have the relevant books and lots of copies of patent documents. (I think this paragraph may be evidence for the bad sign hypothesis.)
Kay
@Miss Bianca:
Really common issue. As they get older people might want to make some effort to winnow because it really is hard for relatives to wrap up the estate. People just think “auction” but 9 times out of 10 most of the stuff in the auction remains unsold. People have all this stuff because it’s the kind of stuff that lasts a long time, which means other people also have it :)
If you could get them together prior to purchasing new- there are probably enough screwdrivers to outfit every single younger person who needs one (or TEN), any simple hand tool- thousands, millions – but they are still making them.
Matt McIrvin
@Miss Bianca: Getting pulled into Amazon’s ecosystem is certainly not great, though some of the stuff I’ve been reading is old public-domain material from Project Gutenberg, which they have in Kindle format among others.
I find the greatest advantages aside from the reduction in clutter are just little conveniences like the reader having a built-in light and the ability to make the text bigger (I am right on the edge of needing reading glasses, in the annoying zone where most of the ones you can get at the drug store are actually too powerful, but it’s just enough to make reading small text physically uncomfortable). And the Kindle app on my phone is there as a secondary means if I’m in a position where carrying around the reader is inconvenient.
Layer8Problem
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Tucked away in the far back in my clothes closet is an MVS JCL manual, a 370 assembler manual, and stuff like that, hauled away from a long-ago temp job at the old IBM intergalactic headquarters where I found someone was emptying an office. My better half would go mad finding that out. “We tossed out all those books when we downsized and moved here and you saved those?” Hey, you can run MVS on a simulator on a laptop these days and Fortran IV might become a thing again, maybe, someday.
mrmoshpotato
@opiejeanne:
Well, when you have 17,000 sq feet to play with… (Holy hell that’s a lotta space!)
Suzanne
@lowtechcyclist: So my category of stuff to cycle out is not books, but the kids’ toys. And right now, it is really hard to find anywhere to donate them. Lots of the thrift stores around here aren’t even accepting any donations. I was raised by Depression-era grandparents, and I’m enough of a crunchy hippie that the idea of throwing perfectly usable stuff out, especially when lots of people with young kids are broke…. just makes me so sad.
Another Scott
@Layer8Problem: +1
Scientific journals realize this is a problem with electronic versions of papers. Most of the stuff I download from the AIP journals comes with a cover page listing a few “Articles you may be interested in” which tries to address the problem, but while it’s faster and convenient, it’s not the same as having the whole tome in your hands where serendipity can take you interesting places.
Maybe one day we’ll all be like Cassandra Cillian, and be able to conjure up screens in front of us to look for hidden connections and stuff.
Cheers,
Scott.
lowtechcyclist
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Matt McIrvin mentioned the birth of a child as being a big turning point in his and his spouse’s book collection. It was for us, too, because pre-parenthood, his bedroom had been the room where most of our bookshelves were. I’ve built a number of sturdy bookshelves to fit in the other available spaces around the house (I’m pretty handy with a table saw), but it still hasn’t been able to make up for all the space we repurposed, so to speak.
So we’re at the point where “we’re out of shelf space” means “we’re out of space to put any more shelves.” Clearly we need to add on to the house. ;-)
Miss Bianca
@MomSense: Biddeford seems like a nice little city to me – what’s your impression of it?
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax:
Oh, your dumb, insurrectionist asses are going to jail, you Dump-humping, fascist shitstains!
Kay
@Suzanne:
These are neat:
My daughter has one in her town on NY and she uses it. Check em out and bring em back.
Layer8Problem
@Matt McIrvin: While taking a bus to Alewife and hopping onto the Red Line not all that long ago I managed to read a Project Gutenberg edition of, god help me, Ulysses over a couple of months on an Android phone. After a while I think I was just plowing through out of spite. I gave up on literature on phones after that. Even if I wanted to I don’t think my eyes are up to that anymore.
Fair Economist
@sab: We also have an orphanage for plush animal companions. They can be surprisingly demanding!
Mike in NC
When we lived in Alexandria, VA it was in a three level townhouse. I filled it with six foot tall bookshelves and routinely bought remaindered books at Borders and Barnes & Noble and online. When we planned to move I started selling off books and twelve years later I’m still selling books.
Suzanne
@Kay: Dude, I think they spend 95% of their playtime with 5% of the toys. The trouble is that people love to give them more! I don’t want to borrow any more, I just want to give them away.
Also, during the pandemic, my FIL was depressed, missing his grandkids, and e-shopping. He would have stuff sent probably weekly. Which is why I now have a plastic remote control T-Rex that scoots around and plays “Enter Sandman”.
HRA
Most of what I read here sent me back to what I retired from in 2014 from the local university libraries where I cataloged material for the libraries. Yes I agree hoarding is the right adjective for what would be in dozens of cardboard gift boxes delivered to me and others to sort. I do not miss being at work. My manager misses me and sends word out now and then. My advice is to donate the material now.
Omnes Omnibus
This is a good thing. Everyone should have one. And I don’t even like Metallica.
narya
@Suzanne: Is there a domestic violence shelter that could use them?
MomSense
@Miss Bianca:
Classic, New England mill town. The economy went through a long period of economic depression but then the artists started moving in and doing cool things in the old mills. As Portland real estate prices rose, the artists, makers and restaurants spread to Biddeford. It’s having a resurgence. I live too far away to visit regularly, but I know a lot of people who live there. My son has played a lot of gigs there. One of my favorite yarn companies has a mill and dye house there.
Benw
@Suzanne:
Quite possibly the coolest thing ever!
debbie
@narya:
Also, something like a Ronald McDonald House near a children’s hospital.
Matt McIrvin
@Layer8Problem: My phone isn’t big but it has a bright OLED screen that makes up for the smallness to some degree. But being able to read on a bigger reader screen is way better, if I can.
The last thing I actually read on my phone was N. K. Jemisin’s short-story collection “How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?” while I was recovering from knee surgery in the hospital–I couldn’t bring much with me, and I only had one hand free because of the IV stuck in my arm. I was also on a powerful witches’ brew of painkilling drugs which probably intensified the emotional effect of the stories, but I loved them all.
narya
I got rid of about 80% of my books a couple of years after grad school, when it became apparent I wasn’t going to be a professor–which still left a ton of books. I stopped buying books years ago, though (with the exception of 2-4 authors whose physical books I’ll buy). I went to the library a LOT (Chicago public library will deliver a book to any of its locations), but then got an iPad specifically for reading while traveling–much easier to carry multiple books. So I use credit card points to buy ebooks–authors get paid, I have the book, I don’t have to find a space for it. It’s not perfect–I, too, like(d) leafing through books and wandering through libraries and bookstores–but I just don’t want more STUFF. And I still have to get rid of books–I keep thinking I want to donate them to prison libraries if possible.
mrmoshpotato
@Suzanne:
Haha! I hate that song but would still find that hilarious.
Uncle Cosmo
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Boo. Much better idea is to give them away to a free lending library like The Book Thing of Baltimore. (Which currently is not accepting donations [or I’d say send ’em our way!] and is open for browsing just one day a month.) If you don’t have something like that in the area, start one – we ought to be encouraging reading.
@Immanentize:
Omnes Omnibus
@Benw: Inorite?
Kay
@Suzanne:
So funny. I’m a thrower-outer so I don’t give grandbaby a lot of toys. I completely get the “there are TOO MANY!”
I think it’s fun for my daughter because she’ll try toys she wouldn’t buy. Baby loved this collection of snakes- like, scientically correct, realistic snakes. The hog snake was different than the rattlesnake. Too scary for a toddler because they had rubber fangs, but she just thought that was great. Chase you with the snake. It’s “free” but you can donate monthly to cover rent, ect. so they do. I bet they’re inundated with donations of toys though.
Doug R
When my dad died in 2014 and my mom in 2017, I went through Dad’s old social work/psychiatry/psychology books and donated them to the local university. Even though it was a satellite campus of UBC, it had a school of Social Work.
James E Powell
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’m with you on the books, but back when I had albums, they were rigidly organized, alpha by artist, then by release date. I wasn’t as crazy as Shrevie in the movie Diner & I certainly wouldn’t yell at Ellen Barkin if she put them back in the wrong place, but I did keep them in order. It’s probably the only thing in my life I kept like that.
opiejeanne
@raven: I’m in Washington state, about 12 miles east of downtown Seattle. The guy who built it had 5 kids and had just sold a phone company to one of the big companies. He went around to all of the neighbors and told them his plans before they broke ground, and promised it wouldn’t overpower the neighborhood. It’s set back from the road and the front lawn with huge trees; it reminds me of visiting a historical house in Ireland, but I can’t remember which. There’s a baseball backstop in the front yard at one side of the front yard, nearly invisible in that vast yard. In the back there’s a tennis court on one side, just outside the indoor pool and spa, and on the other is a swing set/jungle gym. The kids grew up, the family sold it and moved on, but it must have been a magical childhood for the kids.
The people who are trying to sell it, the second owners, had a single child, and he’s grown up and moved away. They did some things to the bedrooms that will cost a bit to fix, installed “cheap” oak desks the length of each room so that in some rooms there’s no place to put a bed. They were running a boiler room, selling steel from China IIUC.
They want $8 million for it, what they paid when they bought it a few year. Oh, I just checked, they paid $7 million in 2000. It’s a FSBO on Zillow now. Pictures at the site, but they don’t really show the house very well.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/14224-168th-Ave-NE-Woodinville-WA-98072/48798733_zpid/
Benw
@Omnes Omnibus: RITE.
Although small deduction for you and that potato guy for not liking Metallica/Enter Sandman. :)
Yarrow
@Suzanne: Are you allowed to put them on the street with a “Free!” sign on them? That’s what people in my neighborhood do and almost everything goes quickly.
Suzanne
@narya: There probably is. It’s just a bit more of a project to hunt down an organization and load up the car and schlep it all.
debbie
Having always lived in apartments rather than houses, space is always limited. I’ve purged books many, many times to make way for new ones. I very rarely reread something, so why I’m keeping any of them is a mystery. I have two three-shelvers with my most favorite authors, organized by author from earliest to latest. Most of them aren’t even around anymore, so I’m not sure why I should bother.
Likewise, I had scads of children’s picture books, having received them as samples back when I was selling them. They’ve fallen by the wayside as I gave them to friends and relatives. There were just too many.
Ebooks are beyond me. I like the weight of actual books, but hardcovers are usually too pricy. I guess I’m headed back toward sticking to paperbacks. Full circle back to when I was in high school.
Mike in NC
A former librarian friend once told me that Fairfax County, VA had one of the finest public library systems in the country. I believed him, and would hit a branch once or twice every week to borrow new books or donate ones that I no longer wanted. The local public libraries where we live now aren’t even worth visiting.
Omnes Omnibus
@James E Powell: Oddly enough, I can understand Shrevie. The importance of music. The fact that he could name the song that was playing the first time he saw her. He is a complete asshole in that scene until that part, when you understand that that is how he sees the world and processes his feelings.
narya
@opiejeanne: I sorta want the place–for me AND several good friends. It could be configured so we’d each have private space with some common areas, too. (I’ve had a fantasy house in my head for years, for when I win the lottery.) Also: why did they not add solar panels??
debbie
@James E Powell:
I wouldn’t yell, but I’d go back later and refile it.
Suzanne
@mrmoshpotato: What is really funny about it is that they obviously didn’t want to pay Metallica to use the actual song, so it’s the song with, like, one or two strategically changed notes. It’s simultaneously fantastic and terrible.
Mike Field
I was at Johns Hopkins for 20 years and knew Dick Macksey — and like everyone, admired him immensely. Don’t let the looks of the picture taken by my buddy Will Kirk fool you. We had a terrible tragedy when a student of Vietnamese descent was murdered (by a crazy street guy who was subsequently caught and prosecuted). I needed to write the eulogy so I called over to Dick to ask what would apply. Instantly, he said, “You need the “Tale of Kieu’ (an 18th Century Vietnamese epic poem) — just a moment.” He put the phone down for a moment, then came back to the phone. “I’ve got it here. Come over and you can use it.” And I did. He was as warm and full and giving as the photo suggests.
bemused senior
@Miss Bianca: best open source reader is fbreader on Android, Linux and windows.
opiejeanne
@narya: They’re hardcore Republicans.
They used to visit China regularly, partly on business, partly as “missionaries”. They belong to a church sect (Assembly of God) that was notorious for burning books when we lived in SoCal.
Layer8Problem
@Miss Bianca:, @Kay:
My mom was a sorta-high-functioning hoarder, and her great loves were ordering esoteric cooking gear she never took out of the box, and books. I had to help her move from Durham, NC back to her hometown in north central West Virginia like twenty years ago. Piles and piles of books later I remembered that books are made out of wood, and realized that I was moving an immense woodpile into a large U-Haul.
Now we’ve reached estate time for my mom, and my sister is convinced a home will be found for these books, along with a pile of mid-Seventies older-female-prep-style clothing. One room alone has a slightly concave floor from the weight of the books in it. I think she’s, to put it charitably, misinformed.
mrmoshpotato
@Benw:
Woah there, slapnuts! I never said I didn’t like Metallica! I just hate Enter Sandman!
Now if this RC dino played the opening solo to No Remorse…
WereBear
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I would.
geg6
@zhena gogolia:
This. The Pitt card catalog had really old cards. I loved that library. And then just across a parking lot, the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh. Which is located just behind the Carnegie Museum. A wonderland for me as a college student.
Yarrow
@Layer8Problem: @Kay:
Swedish Death Cleaning.
tybee
@Layer8Problem: 370 assembler manual
I still have my 370 assembler text.
James E Powell
@Omnes Omnibus:
Music is a big part of how I understand the world, too, so I get him. I’d say the same thing about books, especially the ones I’ve re-read several times, but I never kept them in order like the albums. I wonder what that says about me or my brain.
@debbie:
Most definitely. Try to do it when she won’t see me doing it.
mrmoshpotato
@narya: Cannonballs into the pool after everyone has basketball jonesed themselves out.
zhena gogolia
@Mike Field: Neat!
LiminalOwl
i re-homed 25 cartons of books before moving to my current state But then I married the Duke, who reads more than I do… And since getting my e-reader, most of the TBR pile lives in pixels. We’ve confined most of the book-menagerie to the shelves, but they keep escaping. And we argue about which need to be kept in physical form, and which can be just electronic.
@Phylllis: Are you my unknown twin?
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Throwing books out? Nooo….! (Ours go to the thrift shop if we can’t find a Little Free Library.)
@NotMax: Meant to send that yesterday, but forgot. Not the brightest in the bunch, these insurrectionists. Unfortunately that doesn’t make them much less dangerous.
Layer8Problem
@bemused senior: An emphatic second vote here for fbreader. That’s what I was using for my Boston commute reading above. A real boon for insomniac reading of downloaded stuff on a cell phone.
Suzanne
@Layer8Problem: SuzMom has been out of the workforce for over ten years, and she still has a rack of her old office attire that she deems “good clothes” that she just cannot emotionally separate from. It’s obviously an identity thing. It makes me crazy. None of the clothes are especially “good” (at best, they’re like Nordstrom quality), they’re not in any sort of style. She’s never going to wear them, I certainly am not. She has a lot of other stuff like that.
What makes me craziest about it is that she wants me to take this stuff. Or another family member to take it. But no one wants it. So instead of throwing it out, it just lingers.
LiminalOwl
@satby: We had to throw away a bunch because of water damage. Basement flooded while we were away for the weekend, particle-board bookcases dissolved and dumped contents into the flood.
mvr
Still have most of those, though there is about a crate’s worth in the basement that will be going to a used record store soon – the ones I bought before I had any discernment.
Layer8Problem
@Yarrow:
Dealing with my mom’s stuff over the years, and now after her end, has totally and absolutely confirmed in my head that I will never do this to my kid or stepkids, and that includes dying intestate. Mom was never big on the personal responsibility part of adulthood.
narya
@opiejeanne: Ew. Yeah, hence the reference to home-schooling on one of the rooms, perhaps.
@mrmoshpotato: Well, yeah, except we’re all in our 60s, so maybe not with the basketball.
@Suzanne: Can you take it and take it directly to a resale store? Also, some places send the stuff they can’t sell to salvage–maybe one of the shops near you does that. It keeps the clothes out of the landfill, and the organization makes a little teeny bit of money on it.
opiejeanne
@narya: The photos are staged. None of the furniture except the pool table was in the house the time I visited it before their realtor made them switch things out.
We had a hot summer, incredibly hot for several days in June, and the neighborhood kids discovered that someone had left the door open to the pool area, and they were going swimming for half the summer.
mvr
@Mike Field:
That’s pretty touching, actually.
mrmoshpotato
@narya:
Epic tournament of HORSE?
narya
@Layer8Problem: One of my best friends did this before retiring and moving to another state last year, and her talk about how good it felt to just get rid of stuff has inspired me. I haven’t DONE much–pandemic, don’t have a car, etc.–but I’ve thought about it a lot and I’ve really stopped buying stuff (except running gear). And I have a pile in the basement storage area that will got to resale as soon as things open up and I can arrange it with a friend w/ a car.
Kay
@Yarrow:
They’re nice people who loved their parents or older relatives but it can be exhausting and overwheming, particularly if they are the only child or the only remaining relative of a larger extended family, because that person may have to go thru it 3 or 4 times, and they already have to sell or transfer real estate and automobiles and make sure debts are paid and accounts are located. Just do the garage/shed/cellar at least. Don’t leave someone 21 cans of drying paint or cleaning solutions or 500 mason jars. Computer parts are a big one. Whole closets full of boards and monitors and keyboards and printers.
mrmoshpotato
@opiejeanne:
How nice of them.
Suzanne
@narya: She won’t part with it unless it’s to a family member. The vibe she has gotten over the years with many of her things is that she spent a lot of time and effort accumulating things, caring for them, and now no one wants them, and she interprets that as a deep personal rejection of her and her parents. And because I am lacking the fortitude to deal with this kind of thinking, I just drop the issue.
I think a lot of people thought they would be passing things down and have been pretty emotionally hurt to realize that younger people don’t want their things and that they don’t really have any resale value.
narya
@mrmoshpotato: We’d definitely figure out a way to use the space! Hell we could hire a personal trainer and masseuse (who could share the carriage house) and each have times each day for training. Yes, I have thought about this WAY too much, compared to the likelihood of actually winning the lottery.
WereBear
wasted if you don’t have cats
opiejeanne
@Suzanne: Do you mean Nordstrom Rack quality? Because around here, Nordstrom sells really nice clothing. I’m wearing a dress I bought from them to my son’s wedding this week.
narya
@Suzanne: That’s too bad; I’m sorry. I’m fortunate that my mom is kinda the opposite of that. (For example, we’ve been discussing which of her jewelry I want, and she’s going to give some to other relatives, but she then wants to sell the rest, which is fine by me.)
mrmoshpotato
@narya:
LOL! We all have!
Suzanne
@opiejeanne: I mean that there is (of the 40 or so items) like, one or two things that are nice enough to be from Nordstrom (but like thirty years old) and the rest of the clothes are from Macy’s or equivalent. Clothes don’t really maintain or appreciate in value unless they’re designer. None of these are. They’re just older clothes. The Nordstrom-esque clothes could probably be altered and be perfectly functional for someone, but that takes finding that person who wants them. They certainly are not worth the space that they have been taking up in my house for years.
opiejeanne
@Suzanne: The “antique” stores around here are full of stuff hardly anyone wants, like Fostoria glass. The people who used to want it are dead or in nursing homes.
smedley the uncertain
@Miss Bianca: There are apps available for Kindle and Nook to use on tablets and smart phones. Reading on a cell is awkward some time but it does keep me occupied when waiting for an appointment or a meal etc. I have both on several devices. They sync up so if you stop reading on page 52 and switch to another device, the app opens on page 52.
Fair Economist
@Suzanne: My mom is also a hoarder – she has literally multiple closets of clothes she couldn’t even put on anymore and is too limited to have reason to anyway, papers back to her parents, and a house full of antiques. Thankfully she had accepted that her sons and nieces and nephews will want relatively little of it. I still really dread getting rid of it once she is gone.
debbie
@Suzanne:
Yeah, but there might be that one time when she’ll need to wear that dress from Nordstrom…
At some point, if the clothes are in decent shape, consignment stores will always take and sell them.
Suzanne
@opiejeanne: There has been piece after piece in the press about older people being devastated to learn that all their stuff has much less monetary value than they thought, as well as far less emotional resonance to their kids. To the point where they cannot even give it away. I have a few things that belonged to my grandparents, but for the most part, I want my own things, and I want fewer things in general.
I mean, my grandmother had an open hutch with decorative plates and platters and Hummels and crap. She dusted all that stuff every single week. Because she didn’t have a job. My mom got all that stuff when she died, and none of the grandkids want it. Because we have jobs, no time to dust every week, we don’t do fancy entertaining, and we don’t have houses big enough for freaking china hutches.
opiejeanne
@Suzanne: I get that. The pieces I have from them are at least 5 years old, but are so classic that they’ll fall apart before they go out of style, and I just gave away the most expensive one because I’ve lost so much weight in those 5 years. I just bought size 12p jeans and they fit! and the dress I’m planning to wear is a 12p. It’s periwinkle (lavender-blue?) sleeveless, with a long matching jacket in semi-sheer chiffon (yes, polyester, and it’s almost the cheapest thing I have from Nordstrom) with small rhinestone clasps. It takes 10 pounds right off.
On a somewhat related note, I’ve been decluttering and organizing my pantry for a couple of weeks, and I now have a mighty stack of food-porn magazines like Cook’s and Bon Appetite. I checked online and discovered that my library takes magazines, and these are the ones I’d hate to put into recycling because they’re full of great recipes that I’ll never make but other people might. There are also a handful of cookbooks that I’m rehoming among my family, or sending to the library.
Layer8Problem
@Kay: Simply keeping a list of “important stuff for my loved ones to know in case a bus drops on my head or something” is an immense help. My partner’s mom had a “Just In Case” folder in her filing cabinet which was a real help that way. Account locations and numbers, insurance policy information, logins with PASSWORDS in a sealed envelope.
narya
@Suzanne: Yup. I even have a built-in hutch-like thing in my dining room, except it’s filled with Fiesta ware that I like, and souvenir beer glasses from a zillion beer events I’ve attended, etc. Do I want my mom’s fancy china? Oh hell no
ETA: This seems like it’s very stressful for you, and I’m so sorry about that. It’s hard.
patrick II
@Immanentize:
Call a Republican with a match.
Benw
@mrmoshpotato: another day, another death!
Suzanne
@opiejeanne: I do not have the surplus time to deal with careful disbursement of stuff. Like, I’m sure if I tried and spent a bunch of time and effort, I could find the person who is an amateur seamstress who alters their own clothes for work and would love some of them. But I don’t think any of it would be worth my time, nor my sanity. Like, who even does that kind of sewing anymore?
The disposability of consumer goods is a big problem, but, like, part of the reason people dispose of things is because they don’t have the time or skill to fix things, and things don’t maintain resale value, so it’s not really worth the time or effort.
mrmoshpotato
On topic
Yarrow
@Layer8Problem: A folder or binder with all that stuff is immensely helpful. Even more so if the older person lets a younger person know where and what it is!
If the older person has things that are family heirlooms and they are up for the task they can write notes about what those things are and stick them on the object – on the back or underneath. That can be helpful and also interesting for the younger generation as they go through things.
Layer8Problem
@Suzanne: No one should end up the curator of someone else’s obsessions.
scav
Friend of my mothers spent a good deal of time gathering books for prison libraries. That went over a treat — and she extended into collecting people’s yarn stashes for same.
WereBear
I understand the unbroken chain of inheritance gets snagged when the next generation has kitchens too small to store such occasional China that must be hand-washed.
opiejeanne
@Suzanne: I have a “cheap” antique-looking (to the untrained eye) painted hutch in my dining room, not terribly huge. It displays a bunch of platters that we bought at junk stores for a couple of bucks and which are quite useful for a party. I think we used half of them on Christmas Eve. Inside are mostly inexpensive china. The girls will probably split the 8 plates we use for Christmas Eve; they weren’t expensive, but they are very pretty and unchipped (for now). Half have a red 1″ band with gold reindeer around the outside, the other are white with a large gold reindeer in the middle and a narrow gold rim. I think the first cost $1 each at Macy’s basement in SF in 1993, the others were more like $3 each. For any other dinner, BC*, we have 12 white with gold rims from Pottery Barn. Our kids each got a set of our “good” china several years ago, the Noritake went to our son, the wedding china to one daughter, and my husband’s grandmother’s china to the other daughter. And I really have to get rid of stuff.
I chortled when I read one of those articles about the adult kids not wanting your silver candelabras because I got mine for $25 and they never need polishing. If no one wants them when we do our final downsizing it won’t hurt my feelings, but I’ll bet someone will.
PJ
@zhena gogolia: The irony is that it’s been libraries who have most been behind the destruction of books and card catalogs for the past 20 years. Who will want books when they can have computers and cafes?
Suzanne
@WereBear: Also when the next generation lives far enough away that fragile things like dishes would require shipping, which is expensive, and why fucking bother when you can click click click and have stuff sent to you for free?
trollhattan
@Mike Field:
Worked with a guy, I’ll call him Pete Lange, who quasi lived in his office and was a project manager on an immensely complicated Air Force Superfund cleanup site.
Superfund site remedial investigations are phenomenally data-heavy due to the extensive sampling of soil, soil gas and groundwater. The reports are large and dense with the aim of producing contamination nature and extent, contamination migration, and human health and environmental risk.
Pete’s desk (under which he often slept) and office was nothing but stacks of files, feet high. It looked like a hoarder’s paradise but if you asked Pete about any small thing–geologist’s soil characterization from Boring 187 @62 ft bgs, benzene concentration from soil gas sample in Boring #1007 @ 25ft bgs, Air Force letter from December 16–he would go to the correct stack and pluck it, within a minute.
My brain does not look like that, or at least nor reliably.
zhena gogolia
@PJ: YEAH
But it’s under pressure from administrators
Gin & Tonic
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
No.
Suzanne
Oddly, the only thing I’m even slightly collector-y about is…. books. I like to loan books to friends if I liked one, so I don’t give them away or throw them out easily.
Everything else, though? :::toss:::
realbtl
I used to worry about my guitar collection, currently at 8 but my son in law and his younger than me dad both play. The books are slooowly reducing.
Ruckus
I don’t have a huge ladder sized collection but I am building a new bookcase because the old one I scabbed together from scraps. The new one is an actual bookcase to fit the books I have.
And of course leave room for more…..
When I move I use more boxes for books than anything else.
trollhattan
@PJ: Document “Control” where I work seem to have thrown away the as-builts for what I shall call a very large and complicated public works. And the dudes who built the system and would have marked up those as-builts during construction are all retired and at this point, mostly dead.
It’s…a problem.
opiejeanne
@narya: I have two pieces of Fenton glass. One was a wedding present 52 years ago from a dear friend. It’s a milk glass fruit bowl with ruffled edge and studs around the outside. The other is a turquoise cake stand with a clear ruffled edge. My sister and I bought it at a hardware store as a present for my mom when we were little kids. Dad must have given us a ride, and probably most of the money to buy it. The cake that is served from it is usually angel food, my sister’s favorite birthday cake. I always asked for devil’s food, no surprise there.
PJ
@Mike Field: That’s a great story.
Almost Retired
I’m mid way through a book cleanse, so to speak, in advance of an upcoming major home remodel. It was easier than I expected up to this point. I started with the obviously useless (“Guide to Santa Fe Restaurants, 1983 edition”) and moved on to the 80’s era hopelessly dated/didn’t hold up volumes (Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, etc.). Next up is obsolete or proven-wrong-by-time political books (“The End of History,” etc.)
After that, it will get harder…..
Uncle Cosmo
The Book Thing here in Baltimore (a 5-minute drive away) used to take them, and then open up every weekend for anyone to browse and take – but when they stopped operations at the end of 2019 (founder & former proprietor wasn’t good at forms & paperwork & they lost their non-profit status) their storage areas were already full to bursting. Now they’re back to one day a month of browsing & still not accepting donations. :(
Ruckus
@opiejeanne:
None whatsoever…..
opiejeanne
@Suzanne: Agreed. I ran a very small business in the SF Bay Area, of which I was the only employee. I made costumes for theater, ice skaters, roller skaters, dancers, cabaret shows. I enjoyed it 99% of the time, and 99% of the time I turned away people who wanted alterations because it was almost always cleaning up someone else’s mess.
You can get alterations done at dry cleaners, usually but I’d only have something altered if I REALLY loved it and it was fairly new, like I lost another 15 pounds and that periwinkle dress was still new. The way the weight is dropping off of me now is delightful, about a pound every 3rd day, and I feel very good. It’s the weekly med I take for diabetes 2, it helps you know that you’re full. I did gain a pound at Christmas but it’s gone now, and more.
raven
@Suzanne: We have a beautiful “spool” type wooden bed that my wife inherited and no one wants it.
WereBear
@Almost Retired: A major turning point was electronic books coming out as reprints. I just put the electronic version on my wish list and packed the book for the library sale.
I want them to go to new homes. It’s like rescue. Of books.
frosty
@Miss Bianca: Ms. F bought me a Kindle for Christmas. I’ve been reading eBooks on my laptop when we’re on the road. I found that the Kindle is a little easier to manage.
Books – I haven’t bought a single eBook, I check them out of the library. It takes a couple of steps but it’s not hard to search in Libby, download it for Kindle, then transfer it through Amazon. About half of my reading list is in one of three libraries I have a card for as an eBook.
Almost Retired
@WereBear: I have to reconcile myself to e-books. I have trouble focusing and they give me headaches. But it’s true, they don’t require dusting.
PJ
@zhena gogolia: Where I live (NYC), the biggest pressure comes from the boards of the libraries, who are disproportionately made up of people who work in, or have strong connections to, the real estate industry, or are otherwise just very wealthy. These people don’t read books or have any interest in books or education. What they care about is money, and the sites these libraries sit on are very valuable, so why not close a branch here and there, sell the land at a sweetheart price, put a skyscraper on top, and maybe (not always) open a shrunken branch in the basement a decade after the closing?
They gutted the stacks of the NYPL main branch (on 42nd St. and Fifth Ave., with the lions) which had been the research branch, and shipped all the books to NJ (losing many irreplaceable volumes in the process), in order to turn the building into a big cafe and event space. They were going to close and sell the main lending branch across the street until they were stopped by public outcry, but the stacks have never been restored.
Kay
@Layer8Problem:
It is. And what relatives want, in my experience, is not so much your “stuff” but things like letters or journals – things that are unique to the person and in their own hand (but only if you want them to read them!) They’ll pass by 30 novels but keep their father’s high school yearbook.
opiejeanne
@Yarrow: I need to tie tags to a few very nice things that the kids might consider keeping if they know the owner and the origin. I’ve got to give them the stories I’ve picked up by playing with genealogy, some of them hilarious, some sad, some romantic, some enraging (we have a witch*), but all part of who they are. I need to collect them into a booklet.
*Not a witch, just an older widow with property that men in her village wanted. It was Massachusetts. She was the second wife of an ancestor and spent 5 years in jail before her step-children managed to spring her.
Suzanne
@opiejeanne: The other category that is a constant battle for me is pottery/vases items. I am a potter and I make a lot of that stuff, and then of course I end up getting some as gifts from time to time, or I buy flowers for an occasion and they come in a vase. Before we moved, I gave away four giant boxes of pottery. This is definitely one of those things that accumulates, and I am like EHHHHH.
Jay
@Suzanne:
a lot of thrift stores are suffering badly from Covid economics, and many in the beginning shut down donations for fear of formic transfer, only to never develop policies, procedures and space now that we know what we know.
All too many “thrift stores” rely on volunteers.
WereBear
@Almost Retired: One of the things I like is how I can change the background, font, and size. No more squinting at the inner curve of cheap paperbacks printed too close to the spine.
narya
@Kay: My grandfather was an anarchist, and corresponded with others who also were (including one who was written up in the village Voice when he died). My grandmother threw out his letters when he died. When a grad school friend who studied anarchism heard that story, he nearly wept.
Suzanne
@Jay: Also, a lot of people used lockdown time to get to cleaning/purging tasks that are difficult to make time for. Clean out the spare bedroom, turn it into an office.
opiejeanne
@Layer8Problem: I had to stop my husband’s grandparents when they thought I collected teacups and gave me one two years in a row as a Christmas present. The first I thought was just a pretty thing that caught their eye, I was baffled by the second one and asked. My MIL eventually got them, as well as some truly hideous ones with an iridescent finish that a neighbor gave us and they admired. That was a mistake because eventually we had to dispose of all of their Fostoria glass, the stupid teacups that she started collecting at that point, and a bunch of other stuff that was almost valuable, like the cracked 1940s vase that leaked water from the bottom.
frosty
@Kay: Screwdrivers. When I worked at Giant Engineering / Construction Company in the 70s, all the construction trades received a box of hand tools when they started the job. They were budgeted as “consumables.” Presumably because it would cost more to take them back, sort them out, and prep them for the next job.
When my dad and father-in-law passed away I went through their tools and put together a toolbox for each of my sons. I have no idea where mine will go but I if I never have grandchildren I don’t particularly care. Just put them in the pile with the estate sale.
Omnes Omnibus
It looks as though this thread tracks along the pro- and anti-Kondo lines (I know she did not say that people must….).
opiejeanne
@Ruckus: My sister should have asked for that too, but my parents thought she was an angel and I was the wild one. Ha! I never told them what I knew about her.
Suzanne
@opiejeanne: When I was in college, I worked in a picture framing shop. This was at the height of the Thomas Kinkade craze. People would pay hundreds of dollars for signed-and-numbered ugly prints and then spend hundreds more getting them framed. I bet that shit is now worth about $6.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Omnes Omnibus: She said it was OK to keep your damn books.
opiejeanne
@raven: That’s so sad. We have one that was made in France with a water-turned lathe, circa 1860. It’s an odd size so we had to have the mattress custom made. Wider than a twin, but narrower than a full, and slightly shorter. We paid $65 for it at a garage sale, and it’s in our guest room along with a mission-style child’s dresser. I have no grandchildren; this week I’m getting some instant ones when my son gets married, but they’re both teens and pretty tall. Maybe I should find an antique dealer and sell them.
Sure Lurkalot
My mother collected Lladro and Waterford. My eldest sister got it by default when our mother died because they lived together.
When my sister was terminally ill, she told her daughter that the Waterford was for me. At that point, it was in a box at my other sister’s home where my eldest sister lived when she died. I was able to unpack it all and took only two vases…one of them actually cheap glass but it was my grandmother’s and I liked it. No room for the wine glasses, bowls, platters.
I feel bad sometimes not honoring my sister’s wishes.
Yarrow
@narya:
Someone in an organization I’m affiliated with inherited china from from mother and grandmother. Instead of saving it for special occasions she pulls it out for every informal gathering she has. She has a complete mishmash of plates but it’s fun for her to use them. It has changed how I view using “fine china.” Her view is it should be used, not hidden away in some cabinet. So she uses it!
opiejeanne
@Almost Retired: We were given a kindle by one of our kids, but it didn’t have a light like the other models did so we needed a light on in order to use it. It didn’t glare because it was the “paper white” one. We found that the nook suits us very well, and the brightness is adjustable as is the font size. We 2 that are in current use, and I’ve offered the kindle to a family that might like it but I’ll have to wipe it first because it has too many books on it plus CC info.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: Other than a very few things, I guess I kind of see my belongings more as experiences. Like, I will use them and probably use them up. The idea of them having a lifespan past me is weird. Like, my clothes? My dishes? If someone wants to use them, great…. but they’re intended to be used up.
Of course, I spend way more on consumables than others do, I suppose. My husband did not know it was possible to spend $100 on moisturizer until I helpfully informed him as such.
Omnes Omnibus
@opiejeanne: I have multiple witches in both MA and CT.
James E Powell
@Almost Retired:
Oh man, that’s a big huge discussion.
Matt McIrvin
I think many people who love books have a near-religious aversion to destroying a book, which they associate with anti-intellectualism and repressive regimes, and it makes it hard for them to clear out their collections unless they can sell or donate them somehow–but often their old books are not in any shape to be usable, even if someone wanted them. They get upset when they hear that libraries destroy books when they weed their collections. Librarians, of course, lose any squeamishmess about this from experience.
frosty
@geg6: Carnegie is one of my three libraries for eBooks. If you’re a PA resident, you can also get a card at the Philly Free Library. The third is Baltimore County; we pay $50 a year each for a card. BaCo gives us access to eBooks from any Maryland county library.
I’d love to have a Fairfax County card but they don’t have the same deal for non-residents.
Almost Retired
@opiejeanne: I need to give nook a try then. I resisted Nook when it first came out because you couldn’t walk into a Barnes and Noble without being verbally assaulted by Nook salespeople.
MagdaInBlack
@Yarrow: I have quite a bit of my mothers and grandmothers china, and I do the same thing. It’s beautiful, it feels good to use, and my friends and I are worth it ?.
Eta: Book hoarding: when I moved from the farm to the suburbs, my friends labeled my boxes of books “MFB” more fucking books
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: SO WHEN WE MOVED…. SuzMom had scads of old paperbacks that were falling apart, yellow, tiny-ass print, etc. We tore up the Ayn Rand books to use as packing material. It was funny to unpack the dishes and find shreds of Atlas Shrugged. LOL.
narya
@Yarrow: I totally agree with that approach, actually–it’s just that I really enjoy the Fiesta colors and enjoy telling a grownup to pick their favorite colored plate. I don’t need MORE dishes on top of that. My mom sold her wedding china and silver–to a place that fills in discontinued sets for people, I think. It’s like the thread from a couple of months ago about fountain pens–it inspired me to get mine out and actually start using them again!
frosty
Like the Waterford crystal from my M-I-L that sits in a cabinet. None of me or my sibs wanted my mom’s silverware (real silver). I don’t think she was hurt about it though.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Sure Lurkalot:
Do you have the other half of this amulet…? My mom had her Waterford displayed in a lighted china cabinet that she turned on every evening. I think she would’ve been heart-broken, or at least sad, to know it all went to the charity shop. A surprising number of my cousins wanted her lladro pieces as mementos. My siblings and I were ready to send it all with the Waterford and the two sets of “good” china. We’re all solidly middle-aged with our own over-cluttered homes, and none of us “entertain” in the way my mom understood the word, and we figured if the charity could get something for it, it was the thing to do
and we finally had to pay movers to take the giant-ass damn china cabinet, and her curio cabinets, and at least one couch, to Goodwill.
pro-tip to anyone cleaning out a relative’s home: The bigger the piece, the harder to get rid of. Goodwill will take just about anything, but you have to get it there. And I tell my cousins whose parents are still living, every time you visit, sneak something out, even (especially) if you’re just going to throw it away.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I think my parenthetical comment addressed that. It doesn’t change the fact that Kondo’s idea appealed to some people but completely repelled others. But do get wound up about it if you want.
Matt McIrvin
Oh, yeah, the other thing about e-readers, at least the one I have: they will pop up a dictionary definition of any word at the touch of a finger. This turns out to be extraordinarily useful–in particular, it makes it so much more pleasant to read things in any language other than your native one, as long as a dictionary is available. With a network connection they can also use translation engines. I think it’s a huge boon to anyone trying to learn a language. But it’s good even for reading things in your own language that have obscure vocabulary.
opiejeanne
@Suzanne: I took pottery classes at Santa Ana Community College in 2006-2009, and I have a lot of stuff in boxes in the garage. I also have a lot of pieces I bought from some very talented people who I met at the JC, including several by Otto Heino. I made sure to put the receipts for those inside one, and the receipts for some NA pottery we bought in New Mexico on a trip*. We were looking for a gas station and got onto a side road that I think put us on a reservation. There was a large room attached to the gas station that had pottery that was wonderful. We bought quite a few pieces.
*We rented a Chevy SUV in Philadelphia where a friend was holding 3 very old wooden chairs for us (she was responsible for us buying those things), and drove back to Anaheim, CA. We visited family and friends along the way, stopped at historical spots, and had a wonderful time.
satby
@Suzanne: Take them, and then slowly get rid of them. She doesn’t want to “waste” them, but if you slowly donate them to a resale place she probably would barely notice.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@PJ: Do you mean the main reading room is no longer a reading room? I’ve used that space. They only had a few books in the actual room at the time, most books you had to fill out a little request card for. But a short time later, the requested books would come up from the depths of the library somewhere.
And I knew that across the street were most of the actual books.
For a brief glorious time when my wife taught in the Bronx and we maintained an apartment there, I had a NYPL library card.
Also I knew there were treasured spaces that you could reserve permanently if you had a book contract, to keep materials in.
So what you’re telling me is that now all of that is gone? No reading room, no support for authors writing books?
zhena gogolia
@PJ: Ugh
opiejeanne
@WereBear: They also don’t give off that special dust that the cheaply produced paper does as it ages. That stuff makes me wheeze.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Omnes Omnibus:
Read the link. It’s the Onion version of Kondo. “But do get wound up about it if you want” is pretty much the theme. I think I would watch the hell out of Onion-Kondo if she had a show.
zhena gogolia
@trollhattan: Double ugh
Kay
@frosty:
Guns are the same. Guns last a long time. There are going to be huge piles of AR 15s on tables someday.
I say this as someone who just carried a christening dress that started in Denmark and landed in Michigan for years and years BACK to Denmark, so there are things that matter a lot to people, which is important. I was fascinated with the shoes. Like an adult shoe, but tiny, with a rabbit fur ruff.
opiejeanne
@Suzanne: I knew a lady who got a job working in one of the Kincade galleries in the 90s, back before all the lawsuits. I always thought his work was awful, and the stuff in those galleries was, but I did see a calendar once that was made up of his watercolors of Catalina Island, and they were beautiful.
My parents had a Kincade, but it was not one of those “villages” where the flowers are always in bloom. It was quite subdued by his standards, and kind of nice. I think they bought it at a street fair, before he became (in)famous. My sister has it now, and more power to her.
Baud
@Suzanne:
The trick is for old people to turn their heirlooms in NFTs.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Okay, I am on my phone, so I skipped the link. Mea culpa.
JPL
@frosty: Unless it’s ornate, real silver can be used every day and can be put in a dishwasher. The key is to make sure that it doesn’t touch regular stainless. Since I no longer plan on having large gatherings, I’m going to give my China to the local thrift shop. There are several antique stores in town, and I’m sure that a dealer will buy it.
danielx
@Layer8Problem:
Got that right – one program I use had all its documentation in an html file. I took the file to a printing place and printed out the whole thing on 8.5 x 11 paper to put in a three ring binder about an inch and half thick. PostIts for markers, pen and pencil notes…heaven.
Another Scott
@narya:
Replacements, Ltd.. We filled out the stainless stuff we got from our parents via them.
They also buy stuff, of course.
Cheers,
Scott.
opiejeanne
@Yarrow: At a garage sale we unloaded about sixty demitasse teacups that my MIL had collected. The woman who bought almost all of them was a volunteer at a hospital and held a monthly tea party for breast cancer patients.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay: when I drew up my first will, my lawyer told me that “Dad’s guns” were the thing that he had seen cause the most fights in his career. I hadn’t told him that at that moment my SIL’s family was in a huge feud about their late childless uncle’s two hand guns which were not, as far as I knew, collector’s items. And just a couple of weeks ago a friend mentioned, with some resentment in his voice after twenty years, that his father had given his grandfather’s shotgun to a wastrel cousin, who had almost certainly sold it. My friend doesn’t hunt.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: If the old people make themselves into NFTs, would they be immortal?
Yarrow
@Suzanne:
Can you coordinate with a family member that doesn’t live with you to take the stuff? Then they can donate it where she can’t see them doing so.
Suzanne
The idea of china being anything other than decorative is another anachronism to me, The extent of the in-my-house entertaining that we do are game nights for our friends and kids’ parties, like sleepovers or birthdays. I don’t wanna clean up, so we use disposables. We have platters for holiday meals, but we use the everyday dishes. Other than that, if we want to do something more formal with friends or family, we go to a restaurant.
bemused senior
Around here (SF bay area) there is a non-profit that has good quality donated office wear for job seekers to wear to interviews and to start new jobs. Maybe SuzMom would find that a worthy use of her clothes.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yes! And they would finally have value!
Suzanne
@bemused senior: It’s mostly not good quality and it’s all out of style. You can find better-quality stuff at any used clothing store or thrift store. It’s “good” to her because she remembers spending money on it or altering it or whatever. It is 100% emotional and I do not have the emotional energy to deal with it.
opiejeanne
@Omnes Omnibus: If your family goes back that far, then you’re probably a distant relative. John Lovejoy (I call him The Immigrant) landed in Andover, MA in 1630. At age 8. The family story is that he was an indentured servant when he landed on this continent. There are others, like the Freeman family but their records were screwed up by a couple of charlatans in the 1930s so badly that I can only trace my line to John Freeman of Freeman’s Farm, where the Battle of Saratoga was fought. He was a Royalist, damn him, and there’s an story about him and Burgoyne, and a move he made that cost him and most of his family their lives in an epidemic. I’ve stood on that land where the Brits burned down his house in the Hudson Valley and have rarely seen a more beautiful spot on this earth.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
My youngest sister did a lot of the cleanout of my Mom’s stuff when she died. She decided that out of all the random papers my Mom had kept, everybody got the stuff that had their name on it.
So I got a bunch of elementary school report cards, cards I’d written to Mom from various years, kindergarten art projects, etc. And I don’t remember what I did with that stuff either, I think I threw it into a box called “scrapbook”.
So that means we have an entire chain of people who can’t throw things out: My mother, my sister, and now me. I mean, I understand it made Sis’s decision process easier, she didn’t want to have to deal with any decision making, just throw it in a box and ship it off. But now what?
I don’t think any future biographer or descendant is going to care about the kindergarten picture of the Easter Bunny. But it’s still kind of cool, because I remember making that drawing.
opiejeanne
@Matt McIrvin: The library where I worked for a few years allowed their employees to take home anything that was due to be destroyed. I picked up my first Terry Pratchett book, a tattered and much-loved paperback that Sir Terry signed with the admonition to “burn this book”, because he wanted to sell me a new copy. I have a pretty thorough collection of his books, many of them signed by him. A friend has The Book, one that was given out for free at a Sci-Fi convention before most people had heard of him in the US, and that’s worth a small fortune now. She brought it to the first DiscWorld Con, thinking to have it signed, and I told her to sit down when she sees what it’s worth, both signed and unsigned.
debbie
@opiejeanne:
My grandmother left me an antique dry sink. Best part of it is I can open the drawer and still see the tag with my name in her handwriting.
Suzanne
The number of times I have sat through the, “Here, come go through these clothes with me, take what you want, these are all good clothes!!!” cycle would really surprise some of y’all. It’s always the same, I don’t want anything, so then she puts them all back on a rack or in a box, and tries again next year. And then says, “You can only throw something away once….”
It annoys me to no end that she wants to waste my limited free time with her old shit. At the same time, I am not nice enough to lie and take something and then throw it out, because I know she’ll scrutinize what I wear to see if I actually wear it.
trollhattan
@Sure Lurkalot:
I remember when AJ had the posh rich girlfriend Devin, who visited ches Soprano where Carmela showed off her Lladro collection to the girl. AJ later goes to her
housemansion and is stopped cold by the Picassos on the wall. “Are they real?” “Yeah, dad collects his later stuff.”So damn funny.
ETA I somehow ended up with some of grandma’s Hummels. Winning.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: My parents have told me for years that I shouldn’t expect to inherit much of anything from them–they’re spending their holdings on enjoying their retirement, and my mom, at least, is unsentimental about old clutter. That’s fine with me! In a sense I’ve gotten everything I have from them already, absolutely everything. These families that go absolutely nuts fighting over old dishes or something amaze me.
Omnes Omnibus
@opiejeanne: Hi cuz! My first ancestor in MA arrived in 1629, and the first in CT was in 1636. The CT guy bounced back and forth between CT and Long Island; one of his houses is now the rectory of the Episcopal church in Southhampton. As a good Puritan, he must be rolling in his grave.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: That is awesome. That’s how I want to be. Who needs stuff? Stuff is just more stuff that takes up your space and time.
opiejeanne
@Almost Retired: They don’t even have them on display at ours now. I wanted to pick up a new one a few months ago when our first one died the death and started scrambling all of the info, and I had to ask where they were. They only had one model in stock and we got that. My husband uses it and fights with it constantly because he stubbornly refuses to go to the controls and change settings he doesn’t like. I do it for him, after he gripes at me about how awful it is. It has a feature that will read the book to him if he wishes, but he accidentally turned it on (he’s not careful with his fingers when he’s using anything like cell phones or e-readers) and I had to turn it off for him because he didn’t like it. Other than that, he loves it.
Layer8Problem
@Omnes Omnibus: Sounds like there’s a Black Mirror episode in there somewhere.
trollhattan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
College buddy’s granny collected plates and dolls, dozens and dozens of dolls lovingly displayed around the joint (grandpa was long gone, I expect after an early death brought on by the continual terror of being stared at by dolls).
Sometimes wonder what happened to all that stuff and the large Napa home they occupied. We used to have the annual Sacramento Gun and Doll Show but it’s been truncated to the Sacramento Gun Show. But what about the dolls?
Yarrow
@Matt McIrvin: The fighting is never about the dishes. It’s about old childhood rivalries and hurts and grief over losing the loved one.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: I think my dad gets a little more attached to objects–he has a small collection of antique toy farm equipment that is pretty cool, though not my thing.
The one thing of his that has some sentimental value for me is his old slide rule, a chemical-engineering model that he bought for college sometime in the early 60s. I actually had it for a while, but I think it ended up back in his hands when I left for college. Probably not worth a great deal–the glass cursor is cracked.
debbie
@narya:
I too love Fiesta dishes. When my mother insisted I take the china she got when she and my father married (Royal Doulton Forest Pine, a gray and green pattern), I couldn’t refuse because I knew it was one of the few connections she had to my father who’d died back in the 1970s. Refusing it would be refusing the memories of my parents. I took them, waited a few years, and after she died, I donated them to the local National Kidney Fund.
Suzanne
@Yarrow: The fight is also about how some people attempt to honor someone they lost by caring for their belongings, and then being exceedingly hurt by the fact that others don’t process their grief that way. So rejecting the stuff becomes rejecting the person.
Ohio Mom
@Suzanne: Does your neighborhood have a Buy Nothing group on Facebook? I joined ours, and a lot of the activity is baby and toddler equipment and toys.
Everything gets snatched up really fast — if I ever see anything I’d like, it’s long gone. People say they’re interested in tne consents, the donor contacts them through the private messaging system and leaves whatever it is on the porch for pick-up (this may be a Covid-era adaption).
Layer8Problem
@Suzanne: My sister, with my mom’s outfits, to my other, easily-led sister. One’s time actually does have value.
sab
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: In response to this thread I went down to the basement and threw How to Work Microsoft Office 2000 into the recycle bin, and some sort of histpry book by Woodrow Wilson that my grandfather had saved since college.
Steeplejack
Well, I’m buttoned up and locked down for the storm here in NoVA. A light, dusty snow started about 1:30, and it has gotten steadily stronger and thicker. It’s sticking to the grass and the pavement. Current temp is 24°.
I bestirred myself to put on the tactical gear (pants!) and go out about noon to get a few victuals, mainly cream for my morning cup of joe. Also got some breakfast stuff and gassed up the doughty Kia while I was out. The grocery was very busy, as expected, but for once they had a sufficient number of checkers. Shock!
So I’m in for the duration. I don’t think a power outage is likely, but I’m keeping all of my devices charged up. Also my handy USB-charged portable lamp, an impulse purchase that has turned out to be a keeper. Very useful for under 20 bucks.
Suzanne
@Ohio Mom: Yes, this is probably the route that I will go.
Nelle
My inlaw’s place burned to the ground in the Paradise, CA fire. By then, they had died and my BIL lived there among all their stuff. I was curious as to what the Waterford bowl might look like. A glass puddle? But we have never gone back there. We were surprised, in looking at the photos, to see that not even the chimney was standing. I think my children grieved the most. They were quite proud of the house that Grandma designed (she got her degree in architecture from MIT in the 1930’s. Classmate and friend of I. M. Pei).
sab
@mrmoshpotato: Pools and basketball courts take up a lot of space.
raven
@Nelle: My friends live there and have rebuilt.
Omnes Omnibus
@Layer8Problem: And sometimes a valuable use of one’s time is to do something that makes another person happy even if it bores one to tears.
sab
@Fair Economist: They have their own tiny guestroom.
Steeplejack
I second the recommendation(s) above on Margareta Magnusson’s The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning.
Dwight Garner in the Times:
sab
@Suzanne: Dobby the Demon Cat might like that.
sab
@HRA: I was joyful when I threw 35 years of tax package x’s in the recycling bin. God knows why I saved them so long.
WaterGirl
@bemused senior: We have a store just like that here in Champaign. It’s a great thing that they do.
Nelle
@raven: My BIL moved to Oregon. He keeled over and died while on a walk in May. I can’t say that we mourn him….he cut us out of his life because he was a patriot and we obviously weren’t (despite his brother graduating from the Naval Academy and serving three tours in Vietnam). So it goes. (We do mourn the lack of a decent relationship.)
My sister came home for a short visit from where she was living in then-Zaire to discover that Mom had started giving away her things if someone admired them. So my sister put green dots on the back of things she wanted saved for her. When said sister moved back to the States, to California, it was decided that Mom would go live with her (Sister is a nurse and could care for her). We joked that we would put a green dot on Mom’s bum as Sister was getting the best inheritance of all, Mom herself.
narya
@Yarrow: I think about this a lot. There is exactly one item of my mom’s that I’d fight about–a charm bracelet that is basically our family history. I doubt my brother would try to take it, and if my SIL tried, there’d be hell to pay, but my mom is being smart and writing down who gets what. Otherwise? it’s just stuff. I don’t have kids, and I have two nephews (no nieces), so I don’t even know what I’ll do with the stuff I do get/have.
zhena gogolia
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s crazy talk!
Kirk Spencer
I’m an odd duck. Winnowing turned out to be easier for me. I had the advantage, while early in my library career, of getting the best advice on the subject I’ve ever found. “Sneezing means weeding.”
If pulling the book out makes you sneeze, it needs reviewed. If opening it makes you sneeze, it needs weeded. Books are not there to be admired, they’re there to be read. If there’s dust then it is not being pulled from the shelf (subject/author/genre interest), and if there’s dust when you open it then nobody is reading it.
Caveats and quagmires exist after that, of course. But it makes an outstanding starting point for the process.
And on a personal level it’s easier when you have some small disasters that clear the stacks for you. But still, if you haven’t opened the book in a decade maybe it needs to go somewhere else?
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
It’s a hard thing. I have an appraiser I use who does “collections” (means anything of the same in a group- so can be guns, tools, china, furniture, not “collectibles” which are a whole other thing) and people get really mad. At him, thank God. He takes a lot of abuse. They tend to overvalue their family collections which is fine if it’s emotional value but not fine if it’s money, because there’s a number and it is what it is. You;ve heard “it’s only worth what someone will pay for it”? That’s true :)
They wildly overvalue furniture. It has to be pretty special to be worth anything. It can’t just be kind of high end department store, unless you want to go the “sell individually on facebook marketplace” route, which is certainly an option, but also a part time job.
Nelle
I try to reread Anna Karenina every decade or two. Sort of a measuring stick to see what different things I react to, how I’ve changed as measured against the text. About time to do that again, and, with 12-14 inches of snow, it might just be the time for that good old Russian lit feel of things.
raven
@Nelle: I think you know I meant my friends live in Paradise? Suck about your BIL but I’m sure my half brother feels the same way about me since I cut him out of my life because he and his wife are fucking Nazis.
Ohio Mom
@Yarrow: “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning” is a treasure.
I found it at a used book fair and reread it occasionally. It speaks to me in ways that Marie Kondo doesn’t.
For one thing, the author understands sentimental attachment and is still enjoying shopping. That I relate to, not throwing out tools because they don’t spark joy (there is a story about Kondo using a skillet to pound a nail in a wall to hang a picture because she had tossed the joyless hammer).
I’ve been on a low-level deaccessioning campaign for several years now. I go in spurts, it’s very haphazard but I’m not in a rush — yet. My thought is, when it’s time for us to seriously downsize, I’ll have a bit of a head start.
For books, one thing I think about is whether the book is still in print or if it is on the rare side. No reason to keep the novels you read in high school, you can always find another copy.
Another technique I use is the Outbox. If I can’t tell if I want to keep or give away an article of clothing, it goes in a box on my closet floor, a version of purgatory. Every now and then I go through the box and then it is usually easier to decide what to do. I either realize I don’t miss that shirt at all or I’m excited to see that scarf again. There is another box in tne basement for non-clothing items.
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
At least that’s one problem we didn’t have when the kiddo realized last summer that he had a roomful of toys he’d outgrown (he’s 14 now). He and I boxed them up, and took them to the Goodwill in Edgewater (just south of Annapolis). They were happy to take them.
StringOnAStick
@Yarrow: When we moved in 2020, we had been preparing to do so by using the Swedish death cleaning approach. The name kind of sucks and scares off people though. We have no children and the only nieces and nephew live far away, are people we’ve never known for more than a few minutes at a time and are crazy right wing bigots like their parents so we don’t feel like giving any of it to them. Behavior has consequences.
At first it felt scary to be giving away so much stuff to various organizations, but I have to say I haven’t missed any of it once we unpacked here and after a point it started to feel like we were lightening our load on the planet, plus it made us a lot more careful about what we buy now and if we really need it. We’ve made a close friend who is 20 years younger, and we’d rather give our house contents to him and his family because they are going to need every penny they can get to survive AGW after we’re gone.
What I really dread is dealing with the hoarder level crapfest at my soon to be 90 yo father’s, but throwing all his wingnut books and junk in the trash will be satisfying for sure. After that, it will require a better than N95 mask to deal with all the papers he stored in 3 outside sheds that are no doubt filled with mice and Hanta virus by now. It’s like both my parents decided they could never die if they had enough stuff, my mom like it could never happen as long as there were catalog orders of more cheap crap on the way. The place is infested with bugs because there is so much junk that hasn’t been moved in decades. It’s going to be months of work and we live 3 states away so I am dreading it.
Layer8Problem
@zhena gogolia: With my overly-tractable sister and my dead mom’s out-of-style clothing, the first sister’s just toying with her like a mean-spirited cat.
raven
@StringOnAStick: Who’s gonna want my 6ft tuna????
sab
@Layer8Problem: When I cleaned out my mom’s house a few years back I found boxes in the basement with stuff still wrapped in the 1970s newspaper my aunt and I had wrapped it in when we cleaned out my grandmother’s house. And a very old shoebox with the demitasse cups my other grandparents had inherited from one of their grandmothers. If I send it on to my nephew that’s what, seven generations saving those cups in a box in various cupboards? Kind of nuts.
raven
Talk about holding on to stuff!!!
Georgia football fans had waited 41 years to taste another national championship.
After Monday night’s first title since 1981, a faction of Bulldog fans say it tasted pretty sweet. And perhaps a little bit flat.
Social media was replete with Georgia supporters washing down years of frustration by chugging Coca-Cola out of commemorative bottles that were produced in honor of the 1980 national championship team.
“The taste, give credit to Coke’s bottling practices,” McAfee said. “It tasted like slightly flat Coke with a little bit of a bitter aftertaste. Kind of like Pepsi.”
Omnes Omnibus
@Kirk Spencer: And I have had books that remained unread for years and were a joy once I was in the right mental place to read them.
Kirk Spencer
@StringOnAStick: Hire a professional team to take on the sheds. A professional waste team, mind. Have them clear and clean the sheds.
If any of your family objects, it becomes their project not yours.
opiejeanne
@debbie: I have my Ozark grandmother’s sewing machine, a treadle style from the 1930s, probably from Monkey Ward’s. It has all of the bits and attachments that came with it, including some original wooden spools, some still with thread.
I have hung onto a few more modern wooden spools that thread used to come on, just because. When I was little we used to turn them into furniture for our dolls.
StringOnAStick
@Suzanne: My mom hoarded clothes too, and stuff no reseller wants now because it is too old and out of date. She’s gone now but my dad’s house has 3 closets packed full and two dressers plus tubs, etc., and that’s after we cleared half of one closet so he had a place to put his stuff again. She bought clothes like she breathed air: constantly. As her dementia got worse, she bought even more and of everything. My dad caught her in the middle of a $5,000 order to Omaha Steaks, when at that time they had 4 freezers packed full and were renting freezer space at a local meat locker; why he didn’t put the kibosh on that well before it was to the point where they had no more space for yet another freezer is a sign of how he couldn’t deal with her dementia and is a bit off himself (both of them always have been). No wonder their house still has a mortgage on it and has been refinanced for the umpteenth time to pay debt when my dad was 88 2 years ago.
topclimber
@cope:
@Baud:
B B just lost too many critical races.
opiejeanne
@trollhattan: I have seven Hummels that I actually bought. What an idiotic thing to do, but at the time they were ratcheting up in value, so I thought they’d be an investment. I only like one of them, of a little boy reading a book.
My mother’s dime store fake Hummel has more value than the lot of them because it was from post-war Japan, and it’s actually a nice piece.
Layer8Problem
@danielx: man -Tps 4 sendmail.cf | enscript -DDuplex:true – | lpr [some unsuspecting printer]. One three-hole punch and a three-ring binder later …
“Why? It’s online!”
“You’ll never understand.”
sab
@Suzanne: Do you have a nearby JunkAway? I used them for my dad’s house. They come, fill up a truck amd take it back to their warehouse to sort between landfill and the network of places in turn donate or sell to.
During Covid you could probably leave stuff in the yard.
opiejeanne
@Omnes Omnibus: Haha! That John The Immigrant I mentioned was the town’s fence-minder. He was one of the 23 original settlers in Andover, and he spent a lot of time in court tattling on people whose cows had gotten loose and onto the green. He was also a constable. I think his good wife and the kids did most of the farming by then. The family were Puritans, but after a couple of generations they got over it.
Another Scott
@StringOnAStick: We’ve got a couple of very old fur things from J’s mom in the basement. One is a fox shoulder wrap thing with fake eyes that J says scared her as a child. The other is a short cape or jacket or something. Even if it were still in style, she was a tiny thing so it would likely only fit a waif-like teenager these days.
So much stuff to get rid of… :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
charluckles
My father’s death was really hard on my Mom and brothers. I was already relatively alienated from my father. They were the ones who were with him in his final unfortunately unpleasant days. What finally crushed their relationship was spending the month after his death dealing with the collections he left behind. It’s been years and anytime we all get together the stories about filling dumpsters with junk still have bitterness.
Anyway
@Suzanne:
Anecdotally *FB Marketplace seems to be a good place to give away/sell kids toys, clothes, furniture …
* Evil FB
Soprano2
My mother had 13 full-sized bookcases full of books and DVD’s as well as one half-sized bookcase. It’s mostly British historical romance and real British history (she was obsessed with Britian for some reason), with a good measure of right-wing crazy books thrown in. It’s those last ones I have to make a decision on – sell or throw away?
JPL
The one thing that I have and hope to pass on is a collection of Dept. 56 Snow Village houses. Rather than put them all out, I’ve been selecting six or seven a year. Grand Imp helped me this year, because what grandmother doesn’t let their two-year-old grandson help. Anyway, he was so excited and when his mother came over, he showed her, but cautioned her that they weren’t toys. That alone probably convinced her to take them.
I have several WWII era pieces including a mahogany bowl, that my brother thinks came from the Philippines, and I know those will be claimed.
StringOnAStick
@raven:
That has “spendy/trendy oceanside bar” written all over it!
StringOnAStick
@Kirk Spencer: That is excellent advice, thank you!
No One You Know
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I admire the equanimity with which you said this.
I look at my tidy rooms and feel I made the worst decision of my life. I didn’t know that it didn’t matter if I never read The Minority of Henry III again.
What matters is that I remembered, and could recover.
I look at what’s happening to libraries v Amazon, school boards v anti-intellectual parents, school text publishing in general and 1619 in particular, and I realize intellectualism itself will be privatized. My library might even be the library for my neighborhood block, in a dystopian future.
Steeplejack
Belatedly catching up on the thread . . .
My brother, who is somewhat of an antique hunter, says that the market is glutted with complete sets of fine china and silverware that no one under about age 50 wants. And by “market” he means that there hardly is one. The last place he browsed before the pandemic was selling silverware at almost melt-it-down prices.
trollhattan
@opiejeanne: I had granny’s Hummels before I learned tchotchke, the bestest possible word to describe them. Think they are still in the box that brought them west from Iowa, except the spouse brings Mary out for Christmas.
Kay
@StringOnAStick:
That’s a nice idea. I still have a kitchen table and chairs an older couple in South Bend gave me, which I needed at the time and couldn’t afford. They were retiring south and they just stopped me one morning going to my car and asked.
raven
@StringOnAStick: Yea, I’ll bundle it with all the National Championship swag I bought this week!!!
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
My wife’s going through the stages of grief on this one. She has a lot of her family’s memorabilia from her mom and both grandmothers, and she’s actually going through the stuff of the one grandmother who died during the pandemic right now.
And for years, she had it in her head that she’d be passing it all on to someone in the next generation. But our son isn’t going to want it, her only sibling is in his mid-50s and is unmarried and childless, her one first cousin who’s all but disappeared doesn’t have any kids that we know of (he might’ve spread some wild oats somewhere, but that would be out of our knowledge), and although she’s close with her second cousins, they’ve got their own family stuff.
So she’s finally coming to grips with the fact that she should only save that stuff that she’s going to derive some enjoyment from during her lifetime. But she’s definitely in the ‘depression’ stage as much as in the ‘acceptance’ stage.
NotMax
@opiejeanne
I hear the tall ones fetch a better price.
;)
raven
@lowtechcyclist: I’ve got some firearms from the 1860’s that it looks like no one wants.
NotMax
@raven
A 12 foot cat?
;)
Ohio Mom
@Soprano2: You can throw the right wing crazy books away without a second thought.
Unfortunately, there are still many other copies of those books in the world, they aren’t rare or irreplaceable. No one will miss them.
The other books sound like they may mean something to someone. But I am not a book dealer.
Layer8Problem
@Layer8Problem: And I got the command line wrong. How fallible of me.
Soprano2
@Kay: I’m lucky in a way because after my sister died my mother had to go through her stuff. That inspired her to get rid of a lot of things, so I have a lot less to go through than I would have 5 years ago. I’ve donated a lot of clothes and other personal items to our local women’s shelter.
columbusqueen
@No One You Know: That’s how I think too, which is why library reduction is a non-starter for me. What happens if the world goes to hell & my neighbors need to know how to do something?
mrmoshpotato
@lowtechcyclist:
My condolences, but, damn!, that woman lived to be at least 150!
danielx
I have a small collection of hand carved Zuni fetishes (a fetish for fetishes?) and have not the faintest idea of which family member will want them, if any. If none of them do I will shower curses on them from the hereafter for lack of taste.
Kay
@Soprano2:
I was on Friends of the Library book sale for years – they really do make money on it. The best sellers were always cookbooks, childrens books and romance paperbacks. People who read romance will buy a whole carton without a thought. Worst sellers? Textbooks. We used a company called “Better World Books” for the leftovers, but they only take certain categories.
Jay
@Another Scott:
My Mom bought a bunch of fur coats in the late 60’s and 70’s, used.
When she passed, my SIL knew a couple of seamstress’s who turned them into teddy bears for kids with cancer,
Which leads to the weird. SIL collects teddy bears, but when my Dad passed, she didn’t want his articulated 1920’s teddy bear, because a bunch of the raffia “fur” was rubbed off by 2 generations and part of the nose pattern stitching is missing, so I have it.
opiejeanne
@trollhattan: When WWII ended, my dad shipped home some china including a Hutschenreuther (Sonnenkind) figurine that my daughters and my nieces covet. He gave it to me because it’s a naked girl and my sister didn’t want it. My nieces are mad that I got it because Dad got the idea from an idiot friend that it was worth thousands, but you can buy them on eBay for under $300. I’m tempted to buy 3 so everyone gets one when I’m gone, or before then. It’s a beautiful, delicate piece, definition between her fingers; the later versions of the same piece look heavy and lack the definition and delicacy.
opiejeanne
@NotMax: LOL! Trouble-maker.
PJ
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: The reading room is still there, and, as far as I know, can still be used by scholars. But it used to take a matter of minutes (or hours at most) to receive materials from the desk – now it takes days or weeks, because they have to be trucked in from warehouses in New Jersey, and often materials cannot be located, either because they have been misplaced or because they have been lost forever.
Jay
@StringOnAStick:
Sushi palace?
Wannabe fisherman on Craigslist?
Boiler room roper?
Poorboy shack?
Quinerly
Very late to the thread. I have an acquaintance who buys outdated clothes. She has hook ups with movie industry and also has a business in Japan. I have sold her clothes from the 1940’s-1980’s. I just sold her 6-7 sequin dresses from the 1980’s and was shocked how much l got. I know l made more on a couple of them than l paid 5 lifetimes ago. ?
And as for cleaning out closets, bookcases… When l finally finished on the house l grew up in that was built in 1963, l cleaned out a cabinet l had been avoiding… family “archives” which included the guest registers, sympathy cards for my mother’s 2 grandmothers who died in 1937 and 1952. Same thing for my mom’s mom and dad who died in the late 1950’s and late 1940’s, respectively. I don’t consider myself a hoarder by any means, but stuff like that that had been moved to a couple of houses over the years… I just couldn’t pitch. Plus, l don’t want the bad mojo that would go with throwing it away after it had survived so long and in pristine condition ?. The cards, handwriting and expressions of sympathy are beautiful. The old stamps… The guest registers have sections where food brought to the house is noted. Tells a story of the times…Especially, the Depression Era great grandmother’s funeral. Funerals were a big deal in the South. We do seem to talk about death and cemeteries a lot. ? I have no children, no family left. A stranger will probably have to be the one to pitch it.
SteveinPHX
My local public library branch has an active Friends group and a used books store. I check it for bird books and copies of “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Mason & Dixon.” New but old bird books show up pretty regularly tho the Pynchon books are rara avis in these parts. I just want to preserve copies of the two books with no particular objective in mind. Also get old Elmore Leonard mysteries when I come across them.
This thread has given me stuff to think about. Thank you all! Downsizing/retirement loom…
raven
@Quinerly: Hell, you may been the middle of the thread!
Baud
@raven:
:-)
Ohio
@PJ: When my sister was working as a librarian (in small suburban branches), she would answer you, “Of course we lose books! It’s impossible to keep track of that many items.”
She also expounded on the challenges of deciding what books to purchase, keep and purge. It was an interesting perspective to me.
I’m sure she is as disgusted as you and I are about the NY library’s shenanigans (when I was on high school, I considered the Donnell “my library”).
oops, messed up on my nym and address, now in moderation, sorry FPS.
raven
@SteveinPHX: We have little “take a book, leave a book” boxes all over the hood.
Quinerly
@raven:, ?
I checked in early and it was an interesting thread. Realized l couldn’t get caught up in posting in it because l am in the middle of moving myself. Started loading the POD and finish tomorrow. I’m leaving Mon week to essentially follow it to unload it at new Santa Fe house. Then come back and do it again with a UHaul. I can’t throw away books. Just can’t. I did finally throw away my old law school text books from the 1980’s, though… And l sold my disco era sequin party dresses … So there’s that. My Nancy Sinatra GO GO Boots are packed, though. My mom dressed me well at age 4. She saved them. I’m saving them. They make me smile. “Alexa, play These Boots Are Made For Walking.” ????
raven
@Quinerly: My ex lives there
Ever hear her “Tony Rome”?
A daughter warning parents to lock up their daughter to protect them from her father!
Quinerly
@raven: your ex lives in Santa Fe?
Did not know that.
I closed on this house 12/7. In Eldorado 12 miles out from the Plaza.
Trying to get a handle on stuff here in Soulard. This move from hell. It’s just me.. Making all decisions. Been in this house almost 30 years, St Louis almost 40 years. Spent the month of June getting that family house in NC on the market. As l told a friend this AM… I’m sick of touching stuff… But eyes on the prize. This house in Eldorado is my dream house.
raven
@Quinerly: Yea, I’m not sure exactly where but she really likes it.
debbie
@Soprano2:
My mom had a couple hundred CDs of music she and her friends had listened to when they were young — Billie Holliday, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, etc. Those I kept and grab one to listen to every now and then.
Quinerly
@raven: great horns! I’m pretty sure l haven’t heard this.
And it stumped Alexa.
raven
@Quinerly: She has a website!
mrmoshpotato
Novax Plaguovic booted out of Australia!
Soprano2
@opiejeanne: How many potential buyers could there be for a house like that?
Quinerly
@raven: and a blog and a newsletter. ?
raven
@Quinerly: Didn’t look like much action there.
Jay
@raven:
fishing buddy has a bunch of second hand mounts, bought cheap, estate auctions, garage sales,
has half a dozen fake “tall tales” for each one, to tell at parties and social events to anyone who notices the mount.
The 5 foot barracuda for example, alternately attacked his leg while diving in Cancun, or ate an IFGA record bonefish in the Virgin Islands.
are we going to TBogg this thread?
raven
@Jay: Sheesh, I have my tuna and a redfish and the pics to prove it!
Jay
@mrmoshpotato:
nice, right up there with DeathSantis,……
lowtechcyclist
‘Just’ 96, actually.
sab
When this thread started I thought we would mostly be talking about our favorite books.
There go two miscreants
I have really enjoyed reading this thread, popping in and out while doing other stuff. Another one here with many books, even after some recent downsizing. Still trying to pare down a bit more. Some of the tales in here have made me realize my siblings and I got off lucky: we helped our parents downsize twice (years apart) before they died, so many hands were available.
Princess Leia
After reading this thread i am even more grateful that my parents just walked away from everything- sold the house and contents, purged everything they could (including photos, knowing there is no one who will take them) and downsized to a very small senior apartment. The buyer got a good deal, and I didn’t have to do anything. It was hilarious when my mom would call and tell me all the things that she had donated or thrown out…and then a belated question…”Did you want any of that, oh well, too late!!!” with a knowing chuckle.
Quinerly
@raven: yep. 10 years since she blogged.
Soprano2
@Layer8Problem: I have a friend whose father died suddenly a few years ago. He paid all the bills online. Her mother had no idea what bills they had other than the obvious ones, and didn’t know how much they were, because they were all coming online. They had to spend a couple of hours with the credit union figuring it all out.
I have an index card ring binder in my lunchbox with all my account names and passwords on them. I am lucky that my mom was very organized, I’ve had no surprises so far.
Jay
@raven:
my buddy has real stories as well, some which I have witnessed.
42lb bulltrout, landed on a 6wt, that took a 14inch Westslope Cutthroat, on a #14 Green Drake dryfly.
Cutthroat dove for the deep water by the rockface, saw a log come up and grab it, the Bulltrout took it so deep that the hook in the Cutthroat’s lip also hooked into the Bulltrout’s lip.
Both were released alive, but the Cutthroat needed a bit more attention.
But I just love hearing his “tall tales” to both the non-fishermen and the gullible neophytes, as every 5 years, they get wilder.
The last one, Thanksgiving pre-Covid, involved a Mahi-Mahi mount he bought in a Victoria thrift store, a one man charter out of Oahu, a waterspout, and a fish falling out of the sky onto a gaff.
Fair Economist
I ditched about half my books under Kondo influence a few years back. Since then I toss most books after reading, and have done some smaller cleanings to make room for the few I keep.
Mostly it has been a good thing – it’s great that books are no longer two deep on my shelves. However, I realize I was using old books as a memory jogger and from time to time I remember something but not the book I saw it in. I need to start keeping notes from what I read since I am generally not keeping the books for reference anymore.
Maybe I should write reviews on Goodreads so my notes are usable for other people as well.
Soprano2
@trollhattan: Oh man, that’s what scanning is for. I’m sorry. ?
Ohio Mom
@raven: They are beautiful paintings.
Ohio Mom
The turkey breast is done. Ciao!
Soprano2
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: For some crazy reason my mother bought a Yamaha piano when she got rid of the old piano we got from my grandparents – the sounding board was broken and not worth fixing. It’s a nice piano, and I love Yamaha, but I have no place in my house for it. I’m not sure what will happen with it. I have no idea what she was thinking – that I would take it?
No name
This is such a poignant thread to me. I am currently in the process of decluttering my 50+ years of life, in preparation for a move that will undoubtedly be the last I make, brought about by pandemic job loss and family demands. I have rarely regretted or second guessed myself, but I am overwhelmed by these thoughts now to the point where I have delayed my move three times, at significant financial cost. It seems that every item I need to deal with causes me grief. It’s times like these I wish I had some sort of religious belief.
Soprano2
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: My mother kept things like my sister’s Bluebird uniform and her high school letter jacket. What the hell am I going to do with stuff like that? It has no sentimental value to me. Probably close my eyes and throw it out.
Kalakal
When I moved across the pond to the US about 10 years ago I did a major declutter. I left about 10,000 books among other things, loads of furniture etc etc. The thing I regret most is I had some house plants, bonsai etc I’d had for decades. Spoiler alert, I still have far too much junk. Mrs Kalakal and I share genes with pack rats I fear
Soprano2
@StringOnAStick: Could you hire someone to dispose of it all if you know it’s just junk?
Another Scott
@No name: I’m sorry you’re going through all that, particularly at this difficult time. Hang in there, and good luck!
Best wishes,
Scott.
No name
@Another Scott: Thank you, and cheers!
NotMax
@Soprano2
Perhaps there are quilters hereabouts who might be interested in relieving you of them?
Quinerly
@No name: so sorry. Hang in there. It just has to get better.
Steeplejack
@No name:
Sometimes it helps to write about it—just let it out. Not here, necessarily, just in a note or journal entry to yourself. It can defuse and clarify your overheated thinking.
No name
@Quinerly: Thank you, and congratulations to you on your new chapter!
No name
@Steeplejack: I’ve been thinking about doing that; I know it can be a great help. I don’t comment here often but I felt compelled to put my thoughts down; maybe that’s telling me something! Glad you’re all set for the storm.
opiejeanne
@Soprano2: I’m about 4 miles from the big Microsoft campus. Lots of millionaires around here. There are buyers for a place like this, but most of them are probably contractors who want to subdivide the property and plunk a McMansion or two on it, but I think the county planning office might not let them. We supposedly have a limit on how small a lot can be (1 acre; mine was built on .8 with a variance) and there’s some rule about not subdividing a lot like this.
There are families this would be wonderful for, but most aren’t looking right here if they’ve got $8million to spend. Most of those are building their own dream house.
Ohio Mom
@No name: It’s hard enough decluttering, downsizing, whatever you want to call it (I call it deaccessioning) under happy conditions, how much worse to do it as a Hail Mary.
And living through this era, this historic world wide pandemic, has upended and derailed many of our lives. You are not alone in this. Maybe there is comfort in knowing you are part of this larger moment?
My only advice is to do some reading up on downsizing — just googling will bring you lots of articles. There are tricks, like photographing things instead of keeping them; making up little goodbye ceremonies (Marie Kondo talks about thanking the object for its service to you and letting it go on to serving someone else); sorting through the less fraught things first, like the linen closet, before tackling the most, which are probably the photographs. The “Swedish Art of Death Cleaning” author suggests culling your most personal papers and things into a small box and putting a label on it that it should thrown out, unopened, upon your death.
An older friend, moving to a retirement home, had a white elephant give-a-way at a family reunion. That doesn’t sound like it fits your circumstances, the idea to take away is that there are potentially ways to make preparing yourself for your next stage of life into something that offers some kind of emotional compensation for you.
Or you can do what lots of people do, move the stuff that has you stymied into a storage locker and deal with it later.
One of my plans for when my family downsizes is to bring some extra things with me, to have a yard sale after we settle in. I figure it will be away to meet some of tne neighbors.
Come out of lurking and keep us posted!
mvr
@Jay:
I was willing to believe the Bull Trout story but then the detail about swallowing the Cutthroat so deeply it wound up hooking the Bull Trout in the lip went by. And my skepticism followed right after.
mvr
@No name:
I’m sorry. That sounds hard.
No name
@mvr: Thank you; I hate to complain when so many others have gone through worse but this really is tough.
No name
@Ohio Mom: Thank you for your suggestions and comforting remarks. I absolutely keep reminding myself that many people’s lives have drastically changed in the past few years, in ways much worse than what I am dealing with. I read the death cleaning book a few years ago just out of interest and that is helping. Another great book is Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui.