Books, Michele says, breed in the night. They woo each other. They have affairs. They produce more books. Eventually, you have to make a decision: either you move out and leave them to it, or some of them have to go.
The Great Cull, as I have been thinking of it, began more than a month ago when I finally realised that having piles of books forming on floors, in corners, on tallboys and on almost every table in the house meant that what had been a short-term solution for the increasing overpopulation of books had now become an unsightly long-term mess. There’s one shelf, over what I like to call my “high-fi set”, so overloaded with weighty tomes on gardening it appears to have begun bowing.
The great problem with having a Great Cull is deciding on what basis books should stay or go. Unlike Trump’s America, we at Lush Places believe in due process, so it was important there was a firm basis for non-deportation to the Masterton hospice shop and, most importantly, that there were no mistakes made.
The trouble, I realised as I began considering what was in the piles and on the shelves, is that there are many more reasons to hold on to a book than there are to get rid of it.
A book, for example, might be one that was important to you at a certain time of your life. And though you might never read it again (usually for fear it might not live up to the exalted status it has in your mind), you want to hold on to it because it in some way represents who you once were, or what once mattered to you, or, perhaps, that the book changed the way you saw the world. You can’t let that go.
This is particularly true of books one has owned since childhood. To send those away would be like sending bits of oneself to the hospice shop to be flogged off to strangers for a dollar or two.
There are also books that must stay because they are useful or often needed, like cookbooks, dictionaries and other reference books, such as New Zealand histories. Others must stay because dipping into them will cheer you up on days when sadness or ennui blow right through you like a strong winter southerly.
Some books ‒ art books mainly ‒ should always have a place on the shelves because they are beautiful, or at least contain beauty. Some books must be kept for the opposite reason.
There are plenty, too, which must be retained because they will definitely need rereading. There were, too, I found, a surprising number that I had bought, put on a pile and then had somehow forgotten to read.
In the end, the verdict on a book boiled down to utility, sentiment (or sentimentality), beauty or a gut feeling that it might be best to leave it be – all of which is as useful a guide for life as anything, I suppose.
When I delivered the second load ‒ five large boxes ‒ to the hospice shop last week, the woman who took them seemed surprised by the number.
“Where have these all come from?” she asked. “They bred in the night,” I said.
The Great Cull delivered a few surprises. I had forgotten I had bought, at a local second-hand shop, a little soft-covered book called Wartime Gardening In New Zealand, written by W Philip Carman and published by AH & AW Reed in 1942. It is a no-nonsense collection of good but also rather stern advice for, among others, “the family man who has not grown vegetables previously, but wishes to make a modest start”.
I am such a man. Michele has been the vege gardener. But I have made a vow to make it my business, too, given the parlous and perilous state of the country and the world, and the increasingly mad price of vegetables.
In the book’s introduction, Carman concludes, “It is hoped that, when normal times return, many will have become so interested in ‘getting back to the soil’ that they will find increasing pleasure in working, experimenting and finding recreation in their gardens.” Hear, hear.
