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If the books make you happy and you have room then I'd keep them. Maybe in another 10 years if you still havne't read them again you could consider it.
Personally under no circumstances would I keep a set of encyclopedias from 1980 unless you mean it might be fun to see how the world USED to be if the internet goes down. How much of that information do you think is grossly inaccurate??? The Berlin wall is gone, Saigon is now Ho Chi Min City, Pluto isn't a planet anymore, Western Europe has changed boundaries at least a dozen times. Those are just facts I can think of off the top of my head.
I haven't been through all the posts yet. This is what we did when we downsized. My husband, who worked in IT, had a lot of books that were IT related. He donated all of them when he retired. Next, we donated books that were medical reference types. After all, these days one can find the same info by googling. I went through my cookbook collection and winnowed it down. We both donated some fiction books we had and already read.
Recently, we set out to furnish our apartment. We used one of the design services that big furniture stores offer to customers. The designer, after seeing our apartment and taking photos, insisted that we had no room at all for bookcases. So we didn't buy any. After the furniture came, we realized that the designer was wrong---there is some room for bookcases.
We realize that we won't have as many bookcases as we did in our house. So, once we find good bookcases, we both realize that we will further have to downsize our collections.
What we will keep --- Any books that got autographed by the author, any books that we will regularly use for reference, any books that we have a sentimental attachment. Since I had previously winnowed down my cookbook collection, I will take another look at what I have.
Overall, what I've discovered is that we still have to downsize after downsizing. So, OP, keep in mind that depending on how big your "final" home will be, you may have to further winnow down your collection.
Location: San Ramon, Seattle, Anchorage, Reykjavik
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I keep guidebooks and books I haven't read. Everything else gets donated to the library. I have pretty much stopped buying books that I don't plan to keep. I can get everything else for free from the library.
I read about 60 non-fiction books a year and maybe 5 fiction.
If the books make you happy and you have room then I'd keep them. Maybe in another 10 years if you still havne't read them again you could consider it.
Personally under no circumstances would I keep a set of encyclopedias from 1980 unless you mean it might be fun to see how the world USED to be if the internet goes down. How much of that information do you think is grossly inaccurate??? The Berlin wall is gone, Saigon is now Ho Chi Min City, Pluto isn't a planet anymore, Western Europe has changed boundaries at least a dozen times. Those are just facts I can think of off the top of my head.
As several people (not just you!) have questioned the wisdom of keeping encyclopedias, my reasoning is that a set of encyclopedias might be useful in case the Internet ever goes down for any length of time. (Ditto for keeping a good dictionary and possibly an almanac.) No, a 40-year-old encyclopedia is not very useful for any even remotely current events (unless it is to give some historical background), but I think that an encyclopedia is an excellent source to find basic literary and biographical information and to answer some basic questions about philosophy, religious beliefs and practices, the history of a country before 1980 --as well as giving someone a very basic education about such subjects as geology, biology, etc.
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Btw, it was very amusing to me when so much discussion started a few years ago about whether fracking caused earthquakes -- I live in Colorado, btw, and here it is a very big subject -- I looked it up in my encyclopedia to see if it had anything to say about that, and I was surprised to read the following under "Earthquakes" (subheading 'Kind and Locations of Earthquakes'):
"Humans can induce earthquakes through a variety of activities such as [snip] the pumping of fluids deep into the earth. For example, in 1962 the city of Denver, Colo., began to experience earthquakes for the first time in its history. The discovery was made that the tremors correlated in time with the pumping of waste fluids into deep wells at an arsenal east of the city. When pumping was discontinued, the earthquakes persisted for a while and then ceased."* [END QUOTE]
So, it was very funny that some politicians (and others) were disputing what was known more than 30 years before!
The public libraries here aren't allowed to accept donated books to put into the stacks, even if they are brand new. I inquired about that about ten years ago and was told that all their acquisitions must be ordered and purchased via the County's system and accounted for within each library's budget.
Instead, all donated books are resold (usually for $1 or $2 each regardless of condition) as a fund raising vehicle for the "Friends of the (name) Library" which is a community organization.
Some libraries have a permanent place/box where you can put donations but some have switched instead to a one-day-per-month system whereby if you want to donate books you can only bring them in on a specific day each month.
I'm in the camp that books (particularly old books) are the soul of a room. They contain memories and moods and connect us to our younger selves. Books with inscriptions especially tug at my heart, as do ones with faint pencil marks next to a beautiful passage, or a photograph tucked between the pages.
I have about 20 boxes of books waiting to take their place on bookshelves again when I finally move. I twice did a winnowing down and it felt almost like an amputation. They are back-breakingly heavy but feel like family members and I would be lost without them. I love the bindings and the paper and the typefaces. In some respects they are like external hard drives of my life because they contain so many ideas and descriptions and emotions. I can reach for a certain book and instantly be transported back in time.
Yes, please, keep as many of your books as you can manage. Books are comfort and inspiration.
I have 1,500 non-fiction books (neatly shelved) that I'll be glad to bequeath to a discount bookstore or any such place glad to receive them. I don't plan on moving at this time, and it'd be a sad thing to part with them for practical reasons.
My husband and I have taken our collection down to sentimental items only, like the Tolkien paperbacks he bought with his allowance when he was 9.
This! I used to work as a library assistant. So many people would get offended that we didn't drool over their musty box of books they'd had in storage for a couple of decades. If it's junk to you, it's more than likely junk to the library. And encyclopedias are always junk.
One school library I worked at did an awesome weed one summer. Well, the kerfuffle when a parent saw the boxes in the dumpster! You've have thought we slaughtered puppies. Nope, we got rid of damaged books, outdated books (one stated that one day man may even land on the moon!), and random stuff that cluttered the shelves and made it hard for kids to browse through to find ones they liked.
Books are the ideas, the stories. Not the paper and fabric. Oddly enough, it was working in libraries that made me less sensitive about individual books and gain this opinion. Which many people in my life thought was odd, they thought I'd be super protective about books. Nope, they're replaceable and it's not the end of the world if a kid spills something on one, or a dog eats it (not that I ever had a dog that ate a couple of library books. Ahem. lol Both new hardcovers. Ouch - the replacement costs were high!). Now I mostly take library books out electronically.
I would have hoped the school library's discards went to recycling. But maybe at the time recycling wasn't available?
Anyway, these days books are easily replaceable or the information is online. But back in elementary school we were taught that books were precious, they had to be used year after year (remember reading the names of the students who had your book before you?), and to put a pencil or pen mark in a book meant you had to pay a fine at the end of the year. I think this idea that books are precious was ingrained into many of us from an early age. That's why it is so hard to let go.
Many years ago, I belonged to an online group of vintage jewelry enthusiasts. One of the top experts in the field made a VHS tape that sounded very enticing. But tapes were expensive back then and no one wanted to spend that kind of money on it.
So I made a deal with the group: I'll buy the tape. Everyone who wants to see it please message me and I'll put your name on a list. Once I've seen the tape, I'll mail it to the first person on the list. That person will send it to the next person on the list and so on. OK?
Well, they loved that idea. There were a few hitches -- sometimes people had to be reminded to pass the tape on -- but about 1 1/2 years after I first dispatched it, I got the tape back.
I was stunned to see that every person who'd seen it had added a message of thanks.
Now you're wondering what this has to do with books. Simple: I want to do the same thing with my books.
So I've started working on a site where I will post a few books for loan at a time and people can sign up. Books are expensive too these days, even the trade paperbacks which are my favorite format. I hate to spend $18 on something I'm not sure I will like.
That's the answer. What I'm going to do with my books is distribute them to other peoples' homes.
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