We are sorting books into two categories: those that are going to the auction house and those that are going to our new home. Either way they are all ending up in boxes.
Earl and I each have our own collection of reading materials. His runs toward history, investing, baseball, and fishing. Mine leans toward poetry, contemporary fiction, books on the craft of writing a book, and children’s stories. We are both culling our own books, but Earl made a rule that any book one of us wants to get rid of must be approved by the other.
“Maybe there’s a book I have that you still want,” he said. “So both of us have to agree to send it away.” At first, given the diversity of our interests, I thought this would be unlikely. But when I looked through the books he chose to discard, I actually found a few that I wanted. One, believe it or not, was about baseball. I’d actually given him this particular book, but that wasn’t why I wanted it to make the cut to the new home. Having taken the time to read it before gifting it, I’d found this book interesting and wanted it for my own permanent collection.
In a roundabout way, this also made us create Corollary One: If one of us doesn’t want to keep a book the other gave to us, there are to be no hurt feelings. So when he pitched a beautiful coffee table book about wooden sailboats that had sentimental value to me, I didn’t retrieve it.
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