A few years ago we “decluttered.” We cleaned the sock drawers, threw out threadbare T-shirts (Don’t Fall Run, ’79; a faded Book Woman; and a vintage Kliban cat), and junked old blenders and other appliances we had dumped in the basement.
Marie Kondo, the Japanese tidying-up guru who inspired decluttering, recently alienated book lovers, though. On her new Netflix TV series, she advised two writers to weed their bookshelves. She asked, “Will these books be beneficial to your life moving forward?” And her advice sparked a Twitter fest, or do I mean a Twitter war?
Culling a collection doesn’t sound radical to me: librarians at public libraries do it all the time. The five-year weeding policy at our public library is distasteful to me, but fortunately librarians at university libraries take old books seriously, and owners of used bookstores hoard.
I hoarded my own books for years. That was before black mold and flash flooding attacked our house. Our tidily-shelved and punctiliously-catalogued books had to be stored in boxes while carpenters scraped away at mold that had grown BEHIND floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Needless to say, we did not dare restore the tall bookcases. And so I discarded dozens of Viragos, NYRBs, genre books, biographies, crumbling diaries of Anais Nin, and 1990s fiction. What did I keep? Penguin classics! (And a slew of other important stuff, of course. Our bookshelves are still bulging.)
And then a flash flood wiped out the files in our basement. (Thank you, global warming: our state now has a Living with Flooding program.) Decades of greeting cards and letters from friends—all gone! Correspondence was an important part of my life until email took over. It’s not as though this archive of letters meant anything to anyone else, but I wasn’t ready to part with it.
An article in USA Today made me especially unhappy about the loss of my letters. Apparently the post office handled “2.1 billion fewer letters in 2018 than the previous fiscal year. Online billing is a major cause of the downward trend in letter volume..”
And our post office is no longer open on Saturday! That was a shock to me.
Everything changes, and there’s no use obsessing about it. But I plan to hang on to the very few letters I continue to receive.
By the way, I enjoyed Lory’s post about Marie Kondo at the new blog Entering the Enchanted Castle. Here is the link.