How Many Should I Pack?

If you could only bring one book . . .
but, no worries, you can bring them all!

Illustration from
I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf
By Grant Snider

It's not alway about "How many can I read?"
Sometimes it's about "How many do I need?"
QUESTION: Hey Kit. I’m purging my books again for the last time before I move and I need some advice. Do you regret moving any of your books? The ones I have left I’m rather attached to and I will have bookcases flanking the fireplace so I will have a place to put them. But still there’s a lot of them.

This last week I have been going through old sentimental papers and there was a lot of stuff I didn’t need to be reminded of from the past. However, when I went through my books again I remember reading every one of them and that brought back great memories!!

ANSWER: Our books were by far the costliest item of our move, but worth every penny. I culled a few donation boxes for the library before we moved, but not many. And I have tossed a few in the goodwill bag since we got here — but only a few.

I am very happy to have them and see them all around me, even though most of them I will never reread. Still, it feels important to have them in the background, and you never know when you might want to track down some slight reference to something that crossed your mind.

For example, over Christmas, a reference popped up to an article in Victoria Magazine, December 1992. I went straight to my Christmas magazine section, where I had saved several complete years of Victoria subscriptions, only to be filled with the dull and sinking recollection that I had donated them all to the West Lafayette Public Library fundraiser.

Why????? did I do that? I hope some sentimental soul scooped them up for a few mere dollars to complete her collection and now loves them as much as I did. But honestly, I am still grieving, well into the New Year, over that mistaken decision. It would have cost me nothing extra to have included those magazines in the move, and they would take up only a few inches of shelf space in our new house, and they would have been there waiting for me at that stray moment when I needed them.

But no. I’d had them in my life for over 30 years, and now I don’t. Sigh . . .

Most stuff -- clothes, household decor, dishes, even our wine glasses! -- I would say let it go. But books are different!