A Continued Conversation Regarding Books

[mizarchivist]

This comes from lifecollage and before that, aroraborealis 

The question is: are books sacred? As a professional book handler, is this more/less the case? Well, I whole-heartedly agree with my dear friend and colleage lc that not always.
However, in my particular world I deal more with institutional records (financial, correspondence, annual reports, committees, membership, auxiliary group activities making up the bulk of this sort of thing)-- I see a lot of duplication, material not created by the group/person and a lot of material that had a very fleeting value at the time, but after 5, 15, 50 years, none. There is nothing I love better than to be able to take 15 boxes of odds and ends and bring it into a lean, useful, searchable 7 or 8.
At my particular library/archive, the bulk of our "new" acquisitions are archive and measured by box number or linear foot. One collection can take up as much as 20-30 linear feet. Or 0.25, depending. However, with more and larger collections coming in, we swing around back to the question at hand- we must cull out many books in order to have room. The titles we're not keeping haven't been checked out for decades, and some never. Our collection policy has radically changed. Those listed under general knowledge or US/World history, for example, are so out dated that they're historical in and of themselves. They aren't the books people are clamoring to review. And really- do you really need over 100 biographies about Lincoln? I don't think so.  We do end up sending most of our unwanted volumes to 3rd world countries. I think the only ones we recycled outright were the Atlantic Monthlys with the disintegrating bindings.

I, on the other hand, unlike lifecollage , avoid writing in books. But if they're your book, so be it. Just don't stick post it notes on 16th century text, OK? 'k. Generally speaking, I think that my archive-particular colleagues share my opinions about only keeping the best.

And now- back to baking cookies!
 

Comments

[lifecollage.livejournal.com]

Word, sister. NO posty notes on 16th-century *anything,* unless you're a professional and know it's okay.

Hee

[drwex]

I saw that question and response and sort of agree in my entirely home-based way. I'm not certain if I want to archive (record, LibraryThing) my book collection or just pitch it. Pretty much wholesale dispose of.

[spinrabbit.livejournal.com]

My professional book-handling has crystallized my ideas about how books should be handled in a way that, I think, lowers my standards for the vast majority of volumes currently in existence. In general, I hold knowledge to be sacred, but particular volumes may or may not be.

What I'm describing below is standards for the owner/primary custodian of a book. Other people should treat books at least as well as the owner tells them to, and not alter them or do things predictably likely to damage them without explicit consent. Kids should be taught to handle all books by standards appropriate to keepers owned by others until their judgment is fairly well developed.

I've got three basic categories -- disposable books, keepers, and cultural property. The first category contains anything that has an expected usefulness of less than 5-10 years -- books directly used by the children at a pre-school, that mass-market paperback you bought at the airport and are unlikely to reread, most travel guides, things from the friends of the library book sale that probably nobody else would have picked up and that you plot mayhem on, already damaged copies of widely-available texts, etc. As far as I'm concerned, pretty much anything goes for those -- mending with package tape, writing shopping lists and phone numbers on the endpapers, doodling in the margins, reading in the bath, folding them around backwards, using the pictures for collage, tossing in the recycling bin.

Keepers are books that are likely to be part of your or someone else's personal library for an extended period. If you tried to give it away, would one of your friends or a decent used bookstore want it? If so, I'd probably categorize it as a keeper. I'll say something if people I know are mishandling keepers. I disapprove of using keepers for altered book art unless I personally like the result. :) Writing/drawing in the book is OK if it improves the book for your use (ownership notes, cross-references, commentary, illustration of story). No dog-earing, marking your place with fat things, cracking the spine, using tape. Reasonable efforts should be made to give these away before tossing them.

Cultural property refers to rare, unique, irreplaceable, and hard to replace things. If it's unique and anyone besides the creator would care about it (so, not my shopping list), or it's pre-19th-century, or handmade, or known to have belonged to someone important, etc. For this kind of thing, I'll stick my oar in with people I don't know if they're mistreating it. No writing, except sometimes ownership/provenance marks. No adhesives unless you're a pro. Package it up nicely before transport. No throwing away unless you genuinely tried to find a new home first and you're really desperate for space. No altered books.

[mizarchivist]

Very well put- thank you.