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cull, weed, prune…
17 Jan 07
Saturday while driving, I heard some of the CBC radio show Talking Books, with host Ian Brown. The topic of Saturdays show was culling your personal library:
Ian Brown and his guests mull over what to keep, what to save, and why we hang on to some books for decades, if not forever. If purging your book collection is on that New Year’s list, listen in – it just might help!
Now, “cull” is an interesting word to use, here. In libraries I think we most often say “weed”, although the dismally bureaucratic term “deselect” seems to be quite popular, assumedly because it has no negative connotations, and also because it’s jargon. To me, culling means killing perfectly good members of a herd simply because there are too many of them to continue to live comfortably in their environment. One would hope that the hunters employed to implement the cull target older and less healthy individuals, but who knows, really. Weeding, on the other hand, means getting rid of unwanted plants. Although there are some legally identified noxious weeds in most jurisdictions (e.g. Noxious Weeds in Ontario), generally when weeding our garden we don’t worry about what’s legally a weed and what’s not. If we like a plant, it stays; if we don’t like it, it goes.
That’s a somewhat long-winded introduction to what I really wanted to talk about. What would happen if we decided that we want to limit our book collection to include only those that are interesting as artifacts? It occurs to me that since I work in a library that provides free interlibrary loan, I pretty much have access to the content of any book out there. If I want to read it, I can get it. That isn’t to say I wouldn’t continue to buy new books, or pick up silly things used and at library book sales, but that having done so, I might make the decision whether to add a book to our permanent collection based on criteria that include content as a very minor, if not irrelevant, factor. I can also look at our cluttered shelves, many of which have piles of books in front of them, from a very different perspective if I recast the question of whether something is worth keeping in physical rather than intellectual terms.
Posted by pzed on January 17, 2007 at 6.00pm
Categories: every day, libraries
Comments on "cull, weed, prune…"
Anything that you might want to pull down on a whim and flip through, even though (because) you’ve read it before and it gives you comfort, is worth keeping. This is not to say that we should not get rid of any of our books. But I could probably be content with keeping the poetry and the works of perhaps four or five authors that I love, and giving away the rest.
Posted by jodi on January 18, 2007 at 8.28am :: link
Really? Which four or five authors do you have in mind? Munro, Saramago….
As you know, I recently reread The Master and Margarita, only because I realized I couldn’t remember a single thing about it. I always figured I’d keep the stuff I loved best (Richler, Dostoevsky…) so that I could take it down and have a nostalgic flip through, but that doesn’t ever seem to happen.
On the other hand, we have lots of books that are just plain goofy (does the New Canadian Library fit here?) but I think it’s fun to have them. Again, content is secondary, or perhaps primary but ironically so. The question I deliberately left open is how we would decide whether a book is worth keeping as an artifact.
Posted by pzed on January 18, 2007 at 10.57am :: link
I think the New Canadian Library should without a doubt be kept as an artifact, although I realize that doesn’t answer the question of how that decision (or that decision in regards to other books) is made. I just feel that they are “worth keeping”; is that enough?
So. I said four or five, it may not actually be four or five. But I do take down my old favourites and read them (or parts of them) again. Munro and Saramago go without saying. And the Bulgakov, I’ve been thinking I’d like to read that a third time. Eco, Garcia Marquez, Faulkner. And Ann Marie MacDonald, there’s seven. The urge to hang onto certain books for me comes from the same place as the urge to collect art: I want to surround myself with beauty and brilliance, and be able to take pleasure in certain loved, beautiful things.
Now, why don’t we talk about weeding the record collection?
Posted by jodi on January 18, 2007 at 7.33pm :: link
