My book cull: a loss of shelf esteem | Stuart Walton

Disposing of my personal library was painful, in more ways than one. But do we really need such a space-consuming resource?Do books furnish a room, as Anthony Powell's Bagshaw insists? Or are they just a massive encumbrance?It's a painful question, but one I found myself pondering while moving house recently. By the time I'd sorted through what I definitely wanted to keep, and then rigorously sorted through again to whittle the pile down further, there were comfortably 2,000 books to be somehow disposed of.The conventional wisdom that charity shops will be glad of them can be laid to rest. Lurching in a loaded car between organisations collecting for everything from cancer to homelessness, we were welcomed about as readily as Typhoid Mary. Charity shops can sell clothes and the odd utensil, but nobody, we learned, really goes there to browse for books. Secondhand bookshops were thin on the ground, and anyway there wasn't time for anyone else to start sorting through them.The books were eventually packed into a battalion of supermarket trolleys outside the warehouse premises of a hospice charity, and even then there was much tutting and shaking of heads and fatalistic hoping that it wasn't going to rain. And really, you can see their point. How much critical theory can a hospice shop hope to sell?This is the first time in my life I've seen books ? my own books ? as unwanted junk. I always felt, as the old blues lyric had it, that I would rather go blind than see them walk away from me. But as we loaded them into the trolleys, some still emitting wisps of dust missed by the hasty wet-wiping, they came to seem like the obsessive-compulsive clutter of an unrepentant hoarder. Moments of stabbing nostalgia alternated with shafts of self-reproach (Scruton's Sexual Desire? What was I thinking?) ? I dithered pitifully for minutes with Finnegans Wake in my hands ? but the overall effect was one of laborious disburdening.What's the point of keeping most books once they've been read? They huddle together on the shelves and then, when shelf space runs out, they stand around in precarious columns on the floor, making fossil impressions on the carpet, doing nothing really more serious than bearing witness to what you've read in the past few decades. Do they speak to your visitors of your capacious literary appetite? Or do they just count as old friends, the rows of Nabokovs and Thomas Manns, standing protectively around you on permanent guard?According to one way of looking at the problem, a personal library is an enormous accumulation of books you don't want to read ? either because you once tried and failed, or because you've already read them and won't ever need to reread them. So what function are they actually serving? In past times, the library of a grand house was a domestic resource that contained a repository of knowledge that couldn't be stored in any other way. It was also somewhere your guests might find something with which to entertain themselves in the quiet times between talking and eating.These days, no such extravagantly space-consuming resource seems necessary. There will always be books to which one wants to refer back again and again, but what of most of the novels, biographies of minor figures, the tidal wave of critical theory? The answer is: they can go. Having served their moment, they can be shown the door. It's a brutally efficient new system ? buy, read, flog on Amazon Marketplace ? but it feels like a mid-life rite of passage. And before anyone says "ebooks", I spend enough time staring at screens already.I'm looking at a picture of interior designer Sallie Trout, who has fitted an awkward stairwell in her home with scattered bookshelves, which she accesses by means of a bosun's chair attached to a chain hoist hanging from the ceiling. She looks like she's dangling from a ski-lift stuck somewhere above Zermatt, gamely whiling the time till rescue by leafing through an illustrated book. The crazed ingenuity of it is at once impressive and preposterous. I'd really rather get rid.BooksellersHomesAmazon.comInternetStuart Waltonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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