Plan needed

On the bright side of things, I am slowly finding quite a few books (and DVDs) I had misplaced.  One of them (2001) I want to show at least a little bit to my son to see if he is interested in an upcoming screening (of a 70 mm print!) at TIFF Lightbox.  There is only one book that I really wanted back in my hands and that is von Rezzori's Death of My Brother Abel.  I am so tempted to just order another copy, but I have to be sensible.  I am just drowning in books here, and it is in fact in the Toronto library (and can be checked out, which is not always the case).

On the negative side of things, even after I break down all these boxes, there is essentially nowhere to put them, though I will see if I can squeeze another bunch into this small storage room on the 2nd floor.  This is where we just need a garage desperately.  Anyway, I have roughly 1.5 boxes of the books that are supposed to be on the shelves (high-end fiction and poetry) and only half a shelf free.  I have 13 or so boxes of overflow fiction.  I have at least 5 boxes of urban books with nowhere to go (not even counting anything vaguely transportation or planning related, which has all gone off to work).  And I just uncovered another linear foot of art books, where I just have nowhere to stash them except in a few corners of the living room.

So I need a plan for disposal and reorganization.  The main plan of attack is to swerve into the lower reaches of the TBD pile (after the Russians and An Ermine in Czernopol) to get rid of a lot of books.  I even picked a small handful that I will probably never read and I'll try to exchange them at BMV Books after we are back from our mini-vacation.  Even getting 5 or 6 out of here would feel like positive progress.

While I probably should go cold turkey and just get rid of all the urban books, that is probably just a bit too radical.  First, I need to see if the majority of them are at Robarts or the Toronto Public Library.  Second, I'll probably keep at least for the short term the books on South Africa and China, particularly Shanghai.  I still haven't entirely given up on the idea of writing this chapter, and I would want them around at a moment's notice.  And it will be extremely hard to give up books on New York, Chicago, Toronto and even Vancouver.  There are still quite a few books that would purge  -- and many of the others could go into boxes, though I'd still have to find a place for them.  I hope there is somewhere I could get some money for them, but if not, I can just donate them.  Maybe to UT grad students this time around.

So it's not really much of a plan (and doesn't address CDs or DVDs at all), but that's how I think I will be coping in the near term.  It's just hard, as virtually all the books I've brought into my house had some meaning and value to me at the time.  I don't really like saying some part of my mental life is over (like urban studies), but of course, I really am just being silly in the end, since libraries do exist and the books are just leaving my basement.  I can always get a copy again if need be...


And that's certainly a part of the problem, that while the books coming into the household have slowed to a trickle, I am not willing to cut them down completely.  There are still too many books that are of great interest to me.  Even last night, I was pretty interested in following up on George Walker's plays after seeing Escape from Happiness.  (There's definitely a short review coming of that -- eventually.)  And I got his two volumes of East End plays, since I only had his Suburban Motel plays.  Even if I hold out a bit longer, I am almost certainly going to order the von Rezzori, and so forth.  Do I really think the kids will want to inherit these books?  Maybe. I guess at the back of my mind I hope so.

One positive move was that I did break down and get my Robarts library card, so I will be a bit better about checking out books rather than buying them.  After I was done with that, I went up and down Harbord a bit, looking for Atticus Books.  Well, I couldn't find it.  One bookstore I used to visit has become a Tibetan religious center or something of the sort.  Another one has converted over into a science fiction bookstore.  I probably should have gone poking around in the basement, but I didn't feel up to it.  (I am trying not to get sucked into reading another genre right now.)  And there was a bookstore that seemed to specialize in psychology.  Odd.  I was a bit annoyed, since I was sure Atticus had been around there.  When I got home, I did a quick internet search.  It turns out that Atticus has been an internet-only seller for at least 3 or 4 years, so I don't know why I kept getting the physical location mapped at Harbord.  Probably just as well if I don't hang out in as many bookstores, though that hasn't really changing my buying habits.  Higher shipping prices has done more on that score.  But I do think it is sad that that the generation after the Millennials might not know what a used bookstore looks or feels like.  (Reruns of the brilliant Black Books will not be enough...)

The last positive news is that after I devised this so-called plan, I did find that of the urban books, there are in fact quite a number I do not have a burning desire to read, so maybe I will be able to unload a couple of boxes right away and then leave the harder decisions for later.