I spent this weekend fetching the last of my books from storage (thank you loyal seestrah!). I’ve had a storage unit for about four years. At first it was just for excess furniture, holiday decorations, and childhood memorabilia, but it has grown considerably since I acquired it. In the last couple of years, I developed a habit of visiting my mom, picking up boxes of books she no longer wanted (but which I spent my childhood reading!) and then dropping them off directly into the storage unit on the way home. As a result, I’m not sure my husband knew exactly how many books I had acquired until I fetched them to our new place…
They had been haunting my dreams! Trapped, TRAPPED in storage.
Well, short answer: 24 boxes worth! That includes books I stole from my mom and books I had to pack away during our multiple attempts to move this year. My shelves had already been half-full from the books that came directly from our old home, so I was a little nervous about the unpack.
It wound up taking several hours of backbreaking labor as I hemmed and hawed and fiddled with the arrangement to get things where I wanted, with room to spare in the genres I’m reading the most. But voila, 900 books made it onto my shelves with wiggle room to grow!
The funk of forty thousand years.
I wound up with seven boxes that I’m going to donate– books I didn’t care for, books I got for free but I’m never going to read, some school textbooks and art books that I’ll never reference again, etc. I also have a couple boxes of children’s books tucked away in my closet for future baby. So I’m pretty happy to have a library that I can almost universally recommend (there are a lot of lingering classics that I feel obliged to keep even though I wouldn’t thrust them at my friends… note the 60-volume Great Books series at the top, which I assure you I have not gone through, but which I just can’t let go).
There is also an entire bookcase worth of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Anne Rice, three authors I devoured mercilessly in junior and high school, and which I cannot part with even though my tastes have shifted to a more current wave of fantasy. I really blame my mom’s love of hardcovers– I fit way more per shelf in the other sections. X(
I will now collapse into bed… with a book!
Have a kitty shot for good measure.
Samantha Mills 