In the opening paragraphs of Donna Leon’s latest Guido Brunetti mystery, So Shall You Reap, her detective hero struggles with a predicament familiar to bibliophiles: how to manage an ever-growing book collection. In Brunetti’s case, “the cull” involves deciding which volumes to jettison so he can prevent his library overspilling the four crammed shelves allotted to him in his wife’s study. There are books he wants to re-read. Those he wants to read for the first time. Others he has started but not yet finished. And books he knew, even when he bought them, he would never read. In short, the low-hanging fruit. Out goes Proust, followed by Herman Melville, Alessandro Manzoni and Gabriele D’Annunzio in “a series of visceral judgments” as Brunetti denies cast-outs a chance “to plead for their lives”.
Let’s be honest, haven’t we all been there? That mad moment when we abandon reason and sentiment and haul a bag of books down to the second-hand shop. Admittedly, some holdouts, perhaps blessed with unlimited space, never succumb to downsizing. “Every book I ever bought, I have,” David Bowie admitted. “I can’t throw it away. It’s physically impossible to leave my hand!”
Mind you, he had to stash the overflow in warehouses. Writing in the Guardian about house-hunting expeditions that revealed a sinister paucity of bookshelves, bar the odd coffee table tome displayed strategically as aspirational objects to woo buyers, journalist and author Paul Daley deplored the tyranny of minimalism that “waged a war on bookshelves”. Unlike Brunetti, Daley has read Melville’s Moby-Dick – twice – and while he snaps up three to four new books weekly, “far fewer leave”. Well, books do furnish a room.
Fortunately for Daley, he can indulge his passion – his home has more than 70 metres of shelves – and asks, quite reasonably, “What if I miss them when they’re gone?”
Good point. Who hasn’t suffered seller’s remorse, brooding that a spontaneous cull may have been a tad hasty, even rash? Still, there’s an upside: empty shelves waiting to be filled. During the thrill of the chase, at least pre-Amazon, hunting down a book can be all-consuming, with little thought given, perhaps, to where it will end up.
The late Larry McMurtry, a self-confessed “slave to books”, wrote a novel about this fever, Cadillac Jack, the adventures of a for-hire book scout engaged to find rare editions. McMurtry spent decades canvassing second-hand bookstores and buying up their stock – I spied him once at Dutton’s Books, the venerable, now gone, second-hand mecca in Los Angeles. At one time, McMurtry had amassed some 450,000 second-hand titles for sale across four premises at his Booked Up stores in his hometown, Archer City, Texas, also now closed.
David Bowie wasn’t the only rockstar bibliophile. Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones drummer who died in 2021, was an avid book collector and his extensive library went under the hammer last September. The catalogue depicted mouthwatering first editions, many of them signed, and included works by George Orwell, PG Wodehouse, Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Evelyn Waugh, Dylan Thomas and others. Fittingly, for a drummer who wrote Ode to a Highflying Bird in homage to his idol Charlie Parker, the sale included jazz memorabilia, while gorgeous dust jackets reflected his earlier career as a graphic designer.
Estimates for the 500-plus lots started in the low thousands of pounds but at auction, bids went stratospheric for the big names. Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles sold for a record-breaking £214,200 ($432,000) and an inscribed copy of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby won the highest bid: £226,800 ($458,000). Agatha Christie’s The Thirteen Problems sold for £60,480 ($122,000), record-breaking for a Christie title.
If chasing down books is Saturday night for obsessives, how does Sunday morning shape up when, in all too many instances, collectors run out of road? After half a century acquiring books around the world, carting them from one home to another, often from country to country – many have been back and forth across the equator – stashing them in tea chests and cartons, mailing them in the era of cheap sea mail postage, hauling them on and off planes, watching them be packed, then ferried off, by shipping firms, inspecting them in storage facilities and shipping containers, I’d forgotten how many books I owned and, indeed, what they all were, although some are literary family. This hoard is now in Coromandel, where I’m already fretting I won’t have enough shelf space – my partner is no mean collector herself – and will have to, dread word, downsize.
In the crosshairs
So how to proceed? First, don’t despair. Others have it far worse than you. Public libraries, for instance. Some national institutions are blessed with cavernous subterranean book catacombs, mysterious inversions of the above-ground public spaces. Volumes are routinely hauled up from the stacks. But even the largest library has to confront the cull, as incoming volumes meet finite shelf space. Many books from small regional or suburban libraries end up in the 50-cent bin.
But when the National Library of New Zealand announced in 2020 that its Overseas Published Collection was in the culler’s crosshairs – “deaccessioning” is the official euphemism – there was an outcry. This hoard had been steadily built up over eight decades and most books were out of print.
“We certainly do not consider them to be documentary heritage or taonga,” wrote National Librarian Bill Macnaught, a note of finality I find hard to evoke when evaluating my own treasures.
Like other culls, this one was driven by pragmatism. The National Library boasts four million volumes. Short of acquiring new storage space there just isn’t room for the current stocks if new books are to find a home. The library’s other two hoards– the Schools Collection, with its own deaccessioning procedure, and the Alexander Turnbull Library, which is ring-fenced and “kept in perpetuity” – are exempt. Out of just over 600,000 discards, 13,994 went to other libraries, some found refuge in the Alexander Turnbull and 50,000 were donated to Lions and Rotary for fundraising purposes, the library’s director of content services, Mark Crookston, told me by email. Most discarded titles had “not been issued for the last 20 to 30 years”.
Which isn’t much comfort to researchers who, say, want to physically access foreign volumes without the cost involved of travelling overseas to visit other libraries. The cull was prompted by the library’s desire to find room for its Māori, Pacific and New Zealand collections. A worthy goal, yet it is hard to banish nagging doubts over such a radical act. Does tossing out foreign volumes reflect literary chauvinism or a parochial mindset? Will future generations suffer culler’s remorse?
Finding new homes
Still, if the end of the personal shelf looms and there’s no escape, what to do? A quick online search immediately runs into the US decluttering movement – minimalist tyranny – where books seem subservient to overall appearance. Personally, I don’t find statements such as this one, from declutterbuzz, helpful: decluttering “has a profound impact on your mental health and emotional wellbeing. A cluttered space can contribute to feelings of overwhelm [sic], stress, and even hinder creativity.” Hmmm. That’s exactly how I feel when I contemplate demolishing the book mountain.
By US standards, my collection is already decluttered. After all, this is a nation that has an entire city block devoted to new and second-hand books (Powell’s in Portland: one million volumes). London’s Foyles (200,000) seems quaint in comparison.
If you do decide to take the dispiriting decluttering route, you’re left with a pile of books that must be exiled. Should you have direct access to the street, there’s always the garage sale. Or you can donate unwanted volumes to a local book fair. Rotary, the Lions, schools and community groups all run them, and Dunedin’s Regent Theatre has an annual 24-hour fundraiser.
And don’t forget fellow bibliophiles. Of course, many won’t necessarily thank you for your largesse. As I grow older, a swelling tide of books has headed my way from friends intent on clearing out homes as they contemplate smaller digs.
Or you might bequeath your books to strangers. At least two movements have sprung up to help collectors declutter. Supporters of the Little Free Library movement (littlefreelibrary.org) leave volumes, sometimes by their front gate, in tiny, often custom-build receptacles. The movement kicked off in 2009 when a Wisconsin man built a miniature schoolhouse, nailed it to a post at his front gate, and filled it with books in tribute to his school-teacher mother. Fans of the BookCrossing movement (bookcrossing.com), touted as a global phenomenon, dispense with such tiny libraries altogether, leaving books in public places in the hope others will pick them up. “If you love your books let them go”, entreats the New York Times, appealing to our inner altruist, not necessarily an instinct dear to the hearts of book-hunters.
Cashing up
Finally, there’s the nation’s tiny constellation of second-hand bookshops. Many have vanished, felled as owners retire or rents soar. But hope springs eternal and new ones pop up. We are a nation of book-lovers still. Most businesses exist on the smell of an oily rag, so don’t get your hopes up when you take in your cartons of cherished paperbacks. Shops that survive have to be careful not to be overwhelmed. Hard to Find Books has 500,000 volumes in its Dunedin store (including books waiting to be processed), another 90,000 in Auckland and 4000 crammed boxes in shipping containers. Staff will sometimes visit sellers with large, notable collections, although freight costs are always a consideration.
“We don’t want to see books going into waste bins,” says Shalon Ewington, of the Auckland branch. “We’ll always look. But we have to be strict.”
So what is valuable? High-turnover titles – whodunnits, for instance – may be welcome if stocks are low. Most cookery and gardening books are destined for charity. Ditto diet books. If you have a collection of first-edition, hardback novels, preferably signed by the author, or the sort of titles that sit in locked glass cabinets, you might be in clover. Or any volume with marginalia from the author or a famous owner. The New York Times reported that Amy Winehouse’s copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, with marginalia lyrics from one of her songs scribbled in red ink, along with the other 219 books from her library, fetched US$135,000 ($215,000).
Such trophies, atypical here, might be worth selling online – Cadillac Jack roams cyberspace – although this can be time-consuming and includes postage and packaging costs. “Most dealers are underground – online,” says Siobhan McCormack, proprietor of Hastings’ The Little Red Bookshop. “So I’m probably not the biggest dealer in town.” She has just valued a collection in Auckland and worries that this skill is vanishing, with many gems dumped by charity shops that favour bodice-rippers and thrillers. “New Zealand will have a big hole of titles that aren’t around.”
As I slowly unpack my past, unravelling my literary progress via Pan, Penguin, Picador and other publishers that dominated youthful purchases, I reflect on an adage that should be taken to heart by all collectors: buy one, discard one. Nonetheless, the day will come when I close my heart and jettison volumes. Brunetti’s rule of thumb seems a pretty good guide although, happily, I have more than four shelves. And only one volume of Moby-Dick.
Looking at old books is to be reminded of mortality. How much time do I have left to read? Past a certain age, the likelihood of reading everything recedes in the rear-view mirror. Although, as I sift through cartons, hand poised to exile this or that blast from the past, I console myself – literary family is always inviolate.
DESTINATION SECOND-HAND BOOKSHOPS
Sorry if your favourite isn’t here. I’ve mainly stuck to larger centres, so apologies to those intrepid folk who have opened outlets in small, rural areas. Ruth Shaw made her Manapouri stores famous in The Bookseller at the End of the World. Some dealers will visit sellers if the collection merits.
Whangārei
Piggery Books piggerybooks.com
Auckland
Hard to Find Books hardtofind.co.nz
Jason Books jasonbooks.co.nz
Green Dolphin Bookshop via Facebook
BookMark bookmark.co.nz
Hamilton
Browsers Books browsersbooks.co.nz
Thames
The Land of Books via Facebook
Rotorua
Atlantis Books atlantisbooks.co.nz
Napier & Hastings
Minton Booklovers mintonbooklovers.co.nz
The Little Red Bookshop thelittleredbookshop.blogspot.com
Wellington
Arty Bee’s Books artybees.co.nz
Book Hound bookhound.co.nz
Christchurch
Smith’s Bookshop smithsbookshop.co.nz
Steadfast Books steadfastbooks.co.nz
Oamaru
Slightly Foxed slightlyfoxed.co.nz
Dunedin
Hard to Find Books hardtofind.co.nz
Dead Soul’s Bookshop deadsouls.co.nz
Invercargill
Browse Around Books babooks.co.nz