In which I play with books

Well, my last few posts were depressing and horrible. Or, rather, horribly depressing. Good news! I went to the doctor, I got happy pills, I got my appetite back, and I feel like I can do things again.

Like enter a short story contest.

One of the things I do with my time is play with books. That sounds facetious. I volunteer at a charity shop (Cancer Research UK) and organize their book donations. We try not to have goods on the shop floor for more than a couple of weeks – after that, they get “culled” and go to one of the other shops in town, to get to a new customer base or something like that. So after I sort through the donations, I go through the books on the shelves, pulling the old ones. Then I price and set out new books from the donations.

It’s quite the process, really. I have so much power over these books! I decide whether they are in good enough condition to go out on the shelves (if they’re not, they get recycled in some way), or recent enough. Fiction isn’t a problem, of course, but textbooks and travel books especially – if they’re not from the 21^st century, I toss them. I tossed one today that was a guide to Windows 95. I’m assuming that no one needs a user’s guide to Windows 95 for anything other than nostalgia value. Sometimes I feel bad about some of the travel guides, especially – it can be really interesting to see the differences in tourist advice, or popular areas, or prices over the years. But there’s a point when it’s interesting and a window where it’s too recent to be interesting, too old to be relevant. That window is when I put them in the big white bag.

I have a system of sorts for the storage room, too. Most of the books we get are, of course, fiction. They go on the built in shelves on the outside wall. They’re organized by size rather than anything else, purely for ease of stacking and access. Mass-market paperbacks are on the lowest shelf, just under eye-height, then trade paperbacks (slightly bigger, with slightly harder covers), and then on the top shelf are the large paperbacks – the ones that I’ve seen now as “airport editions” and things like that. Also on the top shelf are some of the non-fiction paperbacks: history, biography, etc. Basically that wall is for anything that you – I – would check out of a library.

Hardcovers are on the other wall, kind of in the same way. Fiction in one area, non-fiction in another. And then we have the reference/specialty books. Diet books, cookbooks (so many cookbooks), gardening books, bird-watching, languages, basically anything that doesn’t fit in with the other categories. They get a shelf of their own, with cookbooks getting a stack on the shelf right by the door. (Seriously. So many cookbooks.)

Kids books are separated into the ones that can go in the 50p bin (picture books, etc.) and the ones that are more for tweens and young adults, which are priced about the same as adult books are. We got a box a couple of months ago that was stacked full to overflowing with teen-girl type books. Some of them are still in the box. I’m shifting them as quickly as I can.

I’m shifting all the books as quickly as I can, really. We have five and a half shelves on the shop floor for books – three of them usually have paperbacks of various sizes, one has hardcover, and one has miscellaneous non-fiction, with a half-shelf near toys for the tween/young adult books. We sell quite a lot of books, and cull quite a lot on a regular basis, but the storage room never seems to diminish.

And some of that is because of days like today. I walked in today and I could not enter the book storage room. We’d gotten so many donations over Christmas (the last time I was in was December 22) that there was literally nowhere else to put the books. It took me at least two hours just to get things sorted, and I was absolutely ruthless about recycling books. If there was any doubt about condition or suitability, into the white recycling bag it went. I then put something like 60 books on the shelves – and one of my fellow volunteers had already done two shelves.

There were three or four boxes full of books today, as well as the mass of bags. I think they were part of an estate sale or something like that. They were nearly all older books, with quite a lot of cookbooks and gardening books and wine-making and things like that. This was one of the times that it was difficult for me to be ruthless when throwing them out (or not), even though I knew I had to be. I kept thinking of my grandparents’ house, which was, and I’m sure is still, crammed to the rafters with books. The collection reflects so much about my grandparents: their interests, hobbies, activities, and so on. I could tell, going through these boxes, what the person who’d had this collection was like in a similar way. I could picture my grandparents’ books going through the same treatment (once the family has pulled out the ones we personally want of course) – sorting through my grandparents’ lives with only minimal consideration for the emotion and history of the books, only looking at how saleable they are. I know it’s necessary, but it’s still difficult.