Boxes of books

As usual—at least if you don't count when I spend the holiday with Marie and her family—I spent the Fourth of July with Mother, Brother, and SIL. (See also, e.g., here and here.)

The Fourth was on a Friday. I drove down in the late morning, and encountered pleasantly little traffic. 

Brother and SIL did all the cooking, and we started to eat in the very late afternoon, as the heat started to lift.

Brother and SIL have also been working their way through boxes of papers in Mother's garage, mostly papers left behind by Father when he died. They have been looking for things that might be worth saving, and trashing the rest. There has been a lot to trash. I don't know how carefully they are filtering them, but I do know that he left behind a lot of junk. That said, I did scan through a box of papers that they had marked "Trash" and found a draft copy of Mother's doctoral dissertation, along with a letter to her from her old faculty advisor. I hope this was an exception.

Meanwhile, Brother has asked me to go through the boxes of books in the garage. There are a lot of these. But I wonder if we are all agreed on what to toss?

When I began to tackle this task on the Fifth, I found—in boxes that had been sitting in the garage—books that I had given as gifts: at the very least there was one that I gave Mother after Father died, and one that I gave Father while he was still alive. Why were they in boxes in the garage, when they used to be on shelves in the house? Clearly someone had decided that they didn't deserve shelf-space. I don't credit Mother with that much energy or initiative these days, and I know it wasn't me. That leaves Brother and SIL. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I judged that both books belonged in the "Keep" pile. So now I wonder if I'll have a fight with Brother and SIL when they find out. (At the moment, I think they don't realize it yet.)

My first pass through the boxes generated three categories of books. 

• Piled up on my left hand were books that I was confident in discarding. (Call this stack "No.") These included "get rich quick" books, lurid exposés of Congressional scandals, and tracts about how Satan is pulling the strings in the modern world. (How did Father acquire those? It's not like he shared that theological perspective!)
• Piled up on my right hand were books that I was confident in keeping. (Call this stack "Yes.") These included anything written by friends of the family (including any number of tiresome tracts privately printed by Tartuffe for his personal church). But they also included classics (like Tocqueville's Democracy in America, or C. Northcote Parkinson's Parkinson's Law), famous or notorious works (like Charles Murray's The Bell Curve), or irreplaceable and unusual works (like a 1905 edition of the Pentateuch in Hebrew, with interlinear notes in English).
• Piled up in the middle was by far the largest category: books that seemed perfectly respectable, as far as that goes, but that I saw no special reason to keep. (Call this stack "Maybe.") As I say, there were more of these than of anything else, but it's hard for me to remember a concrete example. Oh wait—one of them was a perfectly solid history of Franklin Roosevelt's first 100 days as President. Nothing wrong with it! But is there any special reason to keep it? There were a lot more like that.    

Somewhere during the middle of the day on the Fifth, Mother stuck her head in to see how I was doing and to ask if I wanted lunch. We talked for a bit about what she had in mind. She explained that she wanted an expansive library, so that if people were visiting for a few days they could find things to read. She definitely wanted to get rid of the "get rich quick" books, and probably the grungier sort of self-help tracts. But she also insisted very explicitly that this did not mean limiting the selection to books that she herself found interesting. 

About halfway through our discussion, Brother joined us. I summarized for him what Mother had said. Brother spent several minutes trying to persuade Mother that she didn't really believe this: his argument, basically, was that this approach would require adding more shelves, and the house already has plenty of shelves. Aesthetically, it would look better without crowding in still more books. But Mother remained firm.

It's probably more accurate to say that she stood firm in that conversation. It may have helped that I was there too. In general, Mother hates confrontation, argument, or unpleasantness. She will go along in order to avoid it. But she also remarked quietly to me, "I think you are more in tune with how I want to handle the books than Brother is, so I'm glad you're sorting them."

By the end of the Fifth, I had emptied six boxes of books from the garage. (This is maybe a third of the total.) When brother and SIL went home that night, my filtering still looked like stacks on the floor. So it was probably hard for someone else to tell how I intended to disposition each stack.

But after the conversation with Mother, I had determined that (so far as practical) we should keep both the Yes stack and the Maybe stack, discarding only the Nos. On Sunday the Sixth, therefore, I put all the Yesses and Maybes back onto the shelves. I left the few clear Nos in a stack on the floor. Then I explained to Mother what I had done.

I wonder if I'll have a fight with Brother and SIL when they find out. I guess we'll see.