A book lover's dilemma

Scott McLemee on a friend's "urge to purge":

“I am on the verge of making a radical decision,” a professor told me in an e-mail note a couple of weeks ago. The plan taking shape was “to get rid of almost all the books I have in my office,” he said, “based on their almost total superfluity.”

He found that he regularly consulted around two dozen volumes – “references, timeless classics, a couple of recent and invaluable syntheses.” But they were always the same titles. The rest were starting to look like “ugly wallpaper.” The sight was getting oppressive and he started to imagine what it might be like to have a change of scenery.

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At the start, my correspondent estimated that he had 130 feet of books occupying his office. That works out to the equivalent, with ordinary bookshelves, of about 40 to 50 shelves’ worth. He said the moment of decision came when he realized that reducing the collection to “the hard core of actually useful information [without] a lot of filler” would have a fringe benefit: “I could fit a comfortable reading chair in my office.”

It sound like the first thing to go was the dream of reducing his holdings to just two or three dozen titles necessary for preparing lectures. This extreme ambition was revised to trimming down to roughly 60 feet of books. The effort would take a few days, he thought; and he hoped to finish before leaving on a trip that would take him away from the office for a week or so.