Yes, disposal. Are you shrieking NO! NEVER!? Bursting into tears? Wondering where I live so you can bomb my house?
Let me explain, using trees as an example. Trees have life-spans. Certain types of maple live for about 75 years, then they die and must be cut down. Sometimes it’s wise to cut it down when it’s just very sick.
For books it’s not an exact comparison, but it does happen that eventually a can book get very worn, very dirty, very mildewed. At that time, you should put it in the paper recycle (read details for your local garbage collection, some places want you to remove the hard board covers of a hardback book).
Please don’t donate it to a charity. What possible use could it be to them? Charities spend more money than they can afford on dumpsters to haul off donated items that are just plain garbage. They know you can’t bring yourself to throw away a book, and are making them do it.
Ok, now that’s out of the way, let’s get on to care and feeding. Well, care. The feeding part was just to make a snappy title.
Books need steady temperatures (about 70 degrees Fahrenheit) and not to be damp. 50% humidity is fine. The shelf cannot be in direct sunlight, which fades cloth and does a variety of evil things to leather.
They need to be on a shelf, out where the air can circulate around them, standing on their bottoms as they were designed to do. Not sideways – too much chance of them getting twisted and becoming unsquare. The shelf should be packed not too tight, not too loose (the picture up top is how NOT to do it). Too loose, and the books slump sideways, and again, become unsquare. Tight enough = you can fairly easily stick two fingers in either side of a book to pull it out. Never pull a book out by putting your finger on the top of the spine and pulling, this tears the headband of the binding. I looked at an old book recently, if the headband hadn’t been torn it would have been worth quite a bit more than it was.
Do you have books stuffed away in a box in the garage? *profound shudder* Please never put books in the garage. They get damp, mould/mildew (brown spots) grows, eats the paper and glue, and here we are at the paper recycle bin again. Having mildew in the air can do bad things to your lungs. Mildewed books can be treated, and saved, but it’s an awkward, long-winded procedure, only worthwhile for a valuable book. If you want, you can put the mildewy book in a sealed plastic bag with charcoal for a few days, see if the smell is gone. If a book is actually wet, throw it out. Treatment for soaked books begins with freezing, and gets more complicated and expensive from there.
You really should take your books down off their shelves twice a year and thoroughly dust the shelves. Dust each book with a feather duster, flicking the dust down and away from yourself and the book, preferably outdoors. It wouldn’t hurt to wear an air-filtering mask when doing this. Say hello to the silverfish. The more you haul the books out and dust, the more you discourage the bugs.
I guess the main point of what I want to get across here is, don’t be afraid to discard a book when it has run its lifespan. Decent copies can go to a charity thrift shop. Wretched copies, the paper recycle. You can always make a note of the title and get another copy later, if you find you want to. Modern books are printed in runs of tens of thousands, sometimes more. Highly unlikely you won’t be able to replace it.
I once had a conversation with a friend that included the above information. At first she looked skeptical. The next week she said, “I threw out a book yesterday. It’s one of the most freeing things I’ve ever done.”
ABC for Book Collectors, by John Carter, is a good basic text for this field. Also The Care of Fine Books, by Jane Greenfield.
There doesn’t seem to be a category for Scoldy Bossiness, so I’ll tag this with Servicey, instead.
