Bookmongers R Us

In an effort to rid myself of excess possessions, I've opened an Amazon Marketplace shop to sell my (lightly) used books.

To date I've sold about 20 items and have made a modest profit (I finally read the fine print and saw that I could ship books "Media Mail", thank jebus!  First Class postage was eating my lunch!).  Most of my stuff is shamanism-related or New Age type stuff, books that I bought for one nugget, one tiny kernel of something that I needed to learn or wanted to read about but are now just cluttering up my bookshelves and storage spaces.  I have also sold some regular old novels and stuff too, though.

It's been interesting - the first two books I sold I shipped to Australia!  I quickly figured out that overseas shipping might eat my lunch (I lost money on that deal), so I quit doing that.  I'm constantly intrigued by the names and places that come under my eye as I'm packing up books to send, complete with custom bookmarks (designed and made by the hubby) and return packing labels.

I like to think that someone else can get good mileage out of my very lightly used books -  I tend to get on a kick and buy several books at a time, or just buy a book that interests me with its energy, its cover (I know, I know:  don't judge a book by its cover!) or by a recommendation given by another author I enjoy and  whose opinion I trust.

But the reality is that I don't need a library.  I do have a few books I keep which tell me how to do things. I have books which outline a process or which contain resources I can't find on-line, resources I want to have access to when the power goes out :-)  After searching in vain for "answers" in many of the shamanic books that I have bought, I find that most of the answers lie within, anyway.  I've learned more by doing than I have by reading.

So, I've decided to sell my books, one little volume at a time.  And I let go of them as I ship them out, thanking them for coming to me and lending me their wisdom when they did.  With each book I ship, I cut the tie, reclaim my energy, and bless it on its way to brighten the day of another person.  I've had great times with my books so why shouldn't somebody else?

Despite my best efforts previously to pare down, I have so many books in the house and under/near the bed that my husband makes fun of my "floorganization".  I have stacks and stacks of books.  On my bedside table alone I probably have 12-15 books.  In its little shelf below I have another 20.  On the floor next to the bed (on my side, the far side which is hidden from view when you walk in or look through the door) there are probably another 10-15 books.  And this is AFTER I've winnowed down and taken the sellable ones to work to put in my bookcases to await sale!  I don't even like to think about the boxes and boxes and boxes of books I have in storage.

There's probably a word for me as book-hoarder.  "Bibliophile" is polite, but doesn't exactly convey the  exact flavor of voraciousness that names my kind of book lust and thirst for knowing.   To give you an idea, on the references pages of my shamanic web site, I've listed bibliographical info and given thumbnail reviews of 77 books relating to shamanism.  And these are merely the ones I thought worth mentioning; this list doesn't include the books that I thought were lame or which were clearly written by dilettantes.  I have twenty-seven more on my on-line published waiting list, and there are probably ten to thirty more that I haven't bothered to list there, either.  

And these are just my useful books about shamanism.

I also have several wonderful and hard-to-find books on anatomy at the office, including The Body Moveable, an absolutely stunning and informative book drawn entirely by hand by the author.  He wrote this book as a form of taking notes when he himself was studying anatomy.  It is telling that its current used selling price is almost twice what I paid for it new twelve years ago.  AND, since it's classified in my mind as "reference', it will NOT be sold :-)

The books I don't sell after a reasonable amount of time will be donated to a local funky bookstore or two; there's a used bookstore that's about a quarter mile from my office that takes certain items, and there is another one in an old converted-mill-turned-into-arts-hangout that will take the rest.  I hope someone buys them; I've heard from a friend who works at the University library that they are getting rid of their books by the dumpster-full due to on-line resources now available.  "Who needs books and the facilities to store them when you can read it on-line from anywhere?"

This trend bothers me greatly.  From childhood training by dominatrix librarians (remember the "here's how to properly open a new book!" lesson we all got in the library as  kids, and the utter horror with which the librarians spoke about finding ink markings and, *gasp!*,  dog-eared pages! in their sacred tomes? I remember one scary old librarian brandishing such a "destroyed" volume to us captive students while frothing at the mouth and yelling, "See!?! SEE?!?) I still have visceral pains when I see books being thrown away.  I also think about the Library of Alexandria being lost in the fire.  All that information, all that knowledge, gone.

Having seen firsthand the fragility of our electronic infrastructure, I'm worried that the same thing might happen to us in this day and age.  One good, massive and extended power outage would be all it would take.

So, keep your books.