Of course our first date did involve the Call of Cthulhu RPG, so yeah, good call mom.
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I’ve always been a book packrat. By the time I was 25 I had finally (one box at a time) moved them all out of my parents house (and a 7 hr drive away). I then packed then all up for an interstate move, and realized I had about 2000. The apartment had built-in bookshelves everywhere, and they still didn’t all fit. So I started getting rid of some of the books I new I’d never look at again (starting with Animorphs and some duplicates). Next time I moved I had no built in bookshelves and they all sat in boxes in a closet for over a year. Then I moved to a house and donated about two thirds of them - I decided, not that they were clutter, but that someone else could enjoy them more. I kept the cookbooks, my favorite scifi and fantasy, some textbooks and science and philosophy books, some classics, and the 50 or so I haven’t read yet.
My wife and I did purge when our son was born, lost a dedicated “study” JUST so he could have a nursery. 8) Two bibliophiles with three college degrees each (meaning in school you buy lots of books, not oh look how smart we are) and the wife is a librarian and was a book buyer for Powells for a while, yeah, jackpot for the local used book store…
Library reason sounds good, unless you got Attila the Librarian like we got, which means library copy of your donated book was pulped 10 minutes ago, sorry, we have no room for, like, books! C’Mon.
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The community library that serves our area used to have a nearly complete collection of auto repair manuals (Haynes, Chilton, Clymer, etc.) for older model cars. Exploded diagrams. Steps to disassemble, in order. Those of us who work on our own funky funky cars, mostly without a ton of electronics, would come into the clean, quiet library on a cold bad day and sit, warm and dry, in a comfy library chair to plot our next batch of repairs.
Then, one day, the entire set was gone. Poof. Maybe they needed more shelf space. And now I have to hunt down the repair manuals online, if at all, for a price.
Good luck working on current cars. Computers have only multiplied in the newer models. Maybe now’s the time for me to start thinking about a conversion project… but I don’t know much about electric cars. Maybe I should take a good look at the Haynes Repair Manual for the Toyota Prius. I bet those wiring diagrams are enough to make a sane greasemonkey crazy.
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Dunno how they ever caught me in my dinner jacket, but yeah… that’s my wife and me to a T. 
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English translation. Not quite up on my ancient Norse. Eventually. 
Gosh. They’re so neatly stacked.
And before you go off claiming that videos don’t count– there are more bookshelves.
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still cool!
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Oh believe me… nowadays mine looks just like yours (except the videos are kept in a dedicated video cabinet, similarly overflowing). The picture of mine upstream was just the first day after I’d built it (and hadn’t quite finished loading it).
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Oh man, so many books. I need to go through and organize things. Thanks to finally going digital and an excellent library in Seattle I have managed to keep physical book purchases to a minimum. Mostly Doc Savage reprints that I have not read yet and have held off on getting more of those of late as I have a big to read pile of them and my willpower has been good lately as I ran across 2 bunches recently and I would have easily got 5 or 6 books from each.
I have to suggest “Mike Davis - Buda’s Wagon - A brief history of the car bomb”. Pretty good one.
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I have a list of about 300 books I still want to buy. So, no, there will be no getting rid of books.
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In the past I did tend to re-read books a lot, but since my collection grew and especially the non-read part of it, re-reading is a theoretical excersize.
Still, when I’ve read a book, I still use the theoretical change I might want to re-read it as one of the criteria on deciding if I want to keep it.
I was getting stricter after moving house a few times, still, now I’ve got a new bookcase I’ve noticed I’m keeping more and more books again. Well, as long as I have room…
An impression (you can’t see the complete thing, it also has shelves to one floor down and it’s already way more stocked.)
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Library? Yeah right grandad.
Replace that with “can I get it as an ebook?” Then I think he might be right.
1: Do I own the book? Well, okay, I’m keeping it.
End of list.
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I see books with big fuck-off spaceships on them, so you get a pass for that, but egad, man, that is no place for your speakers…
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