One shelf of books

Two summers ago we moved from a flat with fitted shelving to a house with none, and four hundred books went into boxes in a spare room where they stayed for eleven months. When I finally opened the boxes I discovered something unflattering: I could not remember owning most of them.

So I did the drastic thing, and because it was drastic I want to be careful about recommending it. I kept one shelf. Thirty-one books. The rest went to the charity shop on Cross Street over four Saturdays, and the woman behind the counter eventually started saying "more books" in a tone I could not read.

How the thirty-one were chosen

Not by quality, which was my first attempt and was hopeless. Every book is good in the abstract. The question that actually worked was: have I opened this in five years, and if not, is there a particular afternoon I can imagine opening it?

That second clause saved about nine books, mostly reference-ish things: a bird guide, a book about drystone walling I have used precisely twice, a battered atlas. And it condemned an enormous number of novels I had enjoyed once and would never open again. Enjoyed once and finished is not a reason to house something for a decade.

The regrets, because there are some

I gave away a poetry collection that I now cannot find a copy of, and a cookbook with my mother's handwriting in the margin of the shortbread recipe, which I did not notice was in the box until it was gone. That one is a genuine loss and no amount of essay-writing about lightness makes it not one.

The failure mode of decluttering is that it is done at speed, and speed is exactly the thing the rest of this site argues against.

If I were doing it again I would take a year, not four Saturdays. Open every box, keep it open, live alongside the decision. The reason people do it in a weekend is that a weekend is when the enthusiasm is, and enthusiasm is a bad editor.

What the shelf is like now

Better than I expected. Thirty-one books is a browsable number - I can stand in front of it and take in the whole thing, which four hundred never allowed. I reread more, because rereading is what a small collection is for. And the shelf has become slightly self-regulating: a new book arriving makes me look at the shelf and ask what leaves, which is a healthier question than where does this go.

The library card, which I had not used since university, is doing the work the other three hundred and sixty-nine books were pretending to do.