Here are a few tips for sorting through your library and seeing what you can pare down:
1 - Question Textbooks. I'm a pretty recent college grad and I wanted to keep a lot of my textbooks: they were expensive and shrugging them off seemed wrong. Well, I got a little bit lucky because I was a Lit major - there's no reason for me to give up my copy of the Riverside Shakespeare, even if it is a big, heavy textbook; I largely kept my Lit books, though several of the books on literary criticism and theory are taking a hike. I decided to keep my language texts and dictionaries because I'd like to be a better polyglot and those kinds of materials can be expensive. But there was absolutely no reason for me to hang onto things like civics books, algebra texts, or history books (though the Deadite in me knows that there's always a good reason to hang onto a chemistry text).
2 - Ditch Duplicates. Shakespeare is a good example here too. I own the Riverside Shakespeare, which is a comprehensive, annotated, and criticism-filled collection of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. I also own the Barnes and Noble Collected Works of Shakespeare. I also own Hamlet, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Macbeth as Arden editions. I also own Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and Much Ado About Nothing in a cheaper format. I also own Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and King Lear in a tragedy collection. By my count that is a total of 5 copies of Hamlet. I'll try to make due with two copies from now on, and let the rest go into a donation box. But maybe you're not as crazy as me - maybe you've got a Jane Austen collection and another copy of Emma that someone gave you as a gift. Maybe you've got a copy of Moby Dick from high school and another copy that you needed for college. What I'm saying is make sure you know what you own so that you can donate or trade duplicates.
3 - Soberly and seriously ask if you're ever going to read this particular book again. There are some books that I'm not going to read again, and if I do read them I'll just get them on my kindle and not bother storing them. I freaking hated Wuthering Heights. I'm not going to read it again, if I do read it it won't be for years, and I can get a free download of it as an e-book so there's no need for me to keep a book that I don't particularly like just because it will look good on my shelf. There are a LOT of people who buy books because they want to round out their libraries, and that is utter bullshit. No one is going to think less of you for not having a beautifully bound copy of The Iliad on your shelf, but I will TOTALLY judge you for having it and not reading it. Don't be a Gatsby, please actually read the books you own.
4 - Figure out if the book is in a readable condition. I don't exactly know why but I tend to end up with a lot of dissolving books. Some dissolved books would be difficult to replace (things that are out of print, like children's books from the 1950s for example) and so you may want to hang on to them, but other books will be pretty easy to replace. If you've got a Stephen King book that had the glue fall apart because it was left on a dashboard, replace it. It'll be less frustrating to buy a new copy than to keep the old copy collected in one place.
Getting rid of the books was NOTHING compared to cleaning up my magazine collection.
I'm a page designer; it's my number-one hobby and the best thing I've ever been paid for. I have worked for newspapers and magazines laying out pages, editing stories, taking photos, and writing articles, and the magazines have always been my favorites.
I spent 4 semesters as a magazine art director in college, then started a magazine with a bunch of my friends when I graduated. I was on my high school yearbook for 3 years and spent all of that time making the pages look as utterly badass as possible. Basically I've been designing magazines and magazine-style layouts for twelve years now.
All of that got started when I went to a yearbook camp and one of the instructors told me to check out Details (with my parents' permission - I was only fifteen and Details has some things that many might consider to be inappropriate reading material for a 15-year-old). So anyway, I looked up Details and holy shit you guys, that was a REALLY awesome magazine in the early 2000s. I ended up with a subscription and when I was tidying up I realized that I had ended up with about 100 200-page magazines full of men's fashions and tit-shots. I also ended up with two copies of my last two high school yearbooks, about 20 copies of each of my junior college magazines, a giant stack of newspapers full of cartoons I'd drawn and articles I'd written, a year's worth of Communication Arts Magazine that was my graphic design class textbook, two years' worth of print-resolution layouts on my laptop, and about 100 11x17 posters with magazine or chapbook covers on them. And on top of all of that I've got bits and pieces of my design box floating around - little pieces of great advertising or design or cool images that I hoarded over the years so that I could eventually gather them in one place and have a completely badass portfolio to pull design inspiration from.
And I had to get rid of almost all of it.
Book are heavy, everyone knows that. But magazines are heavier. When I looked around at the pile of magazine detritus that was hanging out, I felt like I was drowning in glossy pages and card stock. I ended up hauling well over a hundred pounds worth of magazines into a garbage can that was too heavy for me to pull out to the curb.
It was so, so hard to part with copies of the magazines and yearbooks that I'd had a part in, but I didn't need ten copies of the Fall 2008 issue of the FC Torch - I need, maybe, A copy. Not ten, and so somewhere between fifty and a hundred Torches ended up in a garbage can. I for sure don't need two copies of all of my high school yearbooks - they're huge and heavy and I still remember the bruises I got unloading those fuckers from the truck the day they were delivered; I don't need the same book making the same bruises when I box it up and move into a new life. So I gave a copy to my parents and have one set tucked away for me.
All but two of the Details (those with Daniel Radcliffe on the cover) got pitched, and as a compromise I let myself keep Communication Arts - but I've also been pitching my design box as I find chunks of it because CA acts like a nicely printed and bound version of a design box.
Here are some of the things I learned cleaning up my magazine collection, and some tips for paring down your own:
1 - You don't need the entire print run of a magazine. If you're saving all of the issues of a magazine because you like the style of photography they use, the type of features they write, or the layout of the pages, don't save every copy. Flip through (quickly) and isolate the best examples of whatever it is you like and keep only those issues.
2 - You don't need an entire magazine for a single article. If you've kept the whole January 1983 issue of Vogue for thirty years because it has one fantastic spread, consider cutting the spread out of the magazine and ditching the rest. A three-ring binder with sheet protectors will do a lot of good for you when it comes to cleaning up a collection - especially if you're saving magazines for things like recipes; why save 200 pages when you only need one? Snip out the recipe you want and build a cookbook instead of hanging on to a whole issue, and even if you like a lot of the recipes or articles in a magazine you probably don't want to keep all of the ads.
3 - Figure out what's important to you personally. One of the magazines I came across in my cleanup was the issue of Time that came out the week George Harrison died. Another one was a random surf magazine that inspired a lot of my design. I'm a big Beatles fan, but I don't need to hang onto that Time anymore; the surf magazine was more personally important to me even though Harrison's death was a really big deal to me when it happened.
4 - Desperate times call for drastic measures. Did I mention that I had over 100 issues of Details? Or that I had close to 200 Mad Magazines from three different decades? Or that I had at least 20 copies of each of my college magazines? And that I had at least 100 various Spin, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, Communication Arts, Guitar World, Time, Newsweek, and New Yorker magazines? My magazine collection weighed almost twice as much as I do. I kept telling myself that some of these could be sold, some of them could be donated, and some of them could be kept. I told myself that for two years. I was delusional about them. So I had to make one very simple rule for myself: If my magazine collection is too heavy for me to pick up and carry all at once and all by myself, it is too big. That's all there is to it. I am the kind of person who gets obsessed with magazines and if I don't keep that impulse in check I'm going to get attached to and hoard magazines again until I'm once more up to my ears in unread back-issues.
Please, please, if you collect things, any kind of thing, take a good look at your collection and figure out whether you're in control of the collection or if it's in control of you. Don't give a bunch of space to something that starts to edge you out of your life - it's time for you to assert yourself over that collection if that starts to happen.
Anyway, after all the drama of books and magazines, this is a pretty good picture of what my cleanup is like right now - I've gone through and removed most of the immediately recognizable junk and it's now time to get through the major re-sort, the final step in my plan before actually packing.
Next up for discussion: tidying, organizing, and trashing/donating crafting supplies.
Bag Count so far:
Trash bags - 25
Donations - 18 bags, a boogie board, and a bed.
Memory Book - 6 1gal storage bags
Real Day Count - 13-15
40 Day Task Count - 27
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