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| Photo: Cyberbrethren |
A blogger I follow dared to make the suggestion that personal libraries need to be pruned occasionally.
Barbarian! Heretic!
Well, maybe not. He does have a point. My office area is not quite as bad as this picture, but I have an abundance of printed material standing on my shelves and lying about the house.
The difficulty comes in what to do with books I have read once and never intend to revisit because they are either poorly written or promoted doctrine I could not espouse. More than once I have wrestled over whether to sell a book on eBay, donate it to an organization, or drop it in the recycle bin because of content. I might give it to a discerning friend who can properly ascertain its usefulness.
For those books of good quality, I am all for putting them. An aging preacher did that for me by selecting works from his personal library and handed them to me in a sort of sacred trust to glean from their collective wisdom. His generosity has always been appreciated. Maybe I should start doing the same.
Barbarian! Heretic!
Well, maybe not. He does have a point. My office area is not quite as bad as this picture, but I have an abundance of printed material standing on my shelves and lying about the house.
The difficulty comes in what to do with books I have read once and never intend to revisit because they are either poorly written or promoted doctrine I could not espouse. More than once I have wrestled over whether to sell a book on eBay, donate it to an organization, or drop it in the recycle bin because of content. I might give it to a discerning friend who can properly ascertain its usefulness.
For those books of good quality, I am all for putting them. An aging preacher did that for me by selecting works from his personal library and handed them to me in a sort of sacred trust to glean from their collective wisdom. His generosity has always been appreciated. Maybe I should start doing the same.
2 comments:
I try to go through my library at least once a year to purge books I know I will not be using for future reference. I have built up an apologetics and theological library of almost 1000 volumes, so I start running out of room. Many I've finished with get donated to the church library, many others passed to people who are interested.
It is always sort of sad to give up a book.
I'll take any you want to send my way. Sure have liked reading the one you gave me at Christmas.
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