What to Do With the Stuff That's Cluttering Your Home

Rhonda Kaysan, "What to Do With the Stuff That's Cluttering Your Home," New York Times, Sunday, January 26, 2019, p BU9.

Charities that will take specific donations:...
Books and other Media

• Libraries: Call first to find out their policy for taking gently used books.  Even libraries that do not generally take donations often have a collection day for annual book sales. 

COMMENT

   Some years ago I worked with an especially arrogant male library administrator who foolishly believed that libraries should be run "more like a business."  This man used his administrative power to eliminate the library book sale which was breaking although not making much money.  He claimed it was "inefficient," but I suspect that he actually just hated print books.  He strongly believed in the mythological "death of print" and thought his own advocacy to replace print libraries with ebooks was "cutting edge."

    Fast forward to now.  That same library has re-instated the book sale as a popular periodic event.  What that administrator never grasped was that library book sales are an important public service whether or not the library makes money.  People who buy books need a way to get rid of the ones they don't want to keep.  The New York Times article points out that "used bookstores buy books," but "some stores can be quite selective."  The library becomes a place to re-distribute books in order to support a culture of reading.  Unsold books may still end up in the recycle bin, but not until they have been thoroughly picked over by people who might want to read or re-sell them.

   That same administrator, by the way, failed to grasp that non-ownership is actually one of the biggest benefits of libraries.   He believed if information were cheap enough people would always prefer to store electronic files on  their computers instead of using libraries.  It's not at all clear where he got the idea that organizing digital files is a simple, pleasant or convenient task.  It's actually a great service to be able read zillions of books without having to keep and organize them.  At the library, I can always take a chance on something that I may not end up liking well enough to read all the way through.