We had to stop unpacking book boxes many months ago due to various complex build logistics and the unfinished electrical work in the house, especially in the rooms we’ll be using as studies, the next area that would take the bulk of our remaining books.
However, frustrated by lack of progress and needing the shed space currently filled with books to set up a workbench area for woodworking, we’ve started the unpacking process again.
Before the evil flu bug hit too badly, Hugh brought in about another 20 boxes of books so that whilst we snuffled about and drank honey & lemon we could at least be sorting things out indoors. With lots of rest.
It’s like watching ink being sucked up on blotting paper, this process of finding homes for books. Slowly, slowly they have started filling the shelves, migrating to various places based on their classification.
We’ve definitely got some pruning to do. It’s inevitable, I guess, when the lives of two lifelong book lovers come together.
I’ve found at least three copies of Nigel Slaters Kitchen Diaries, lots of duplicates of Terry Pratchett, Hilary Mantel, Ian M.Banks, Asimov, Carol Ann Duffy, Maya Angelou, and a lot of duplication in the natural sciences, myth and folklore and art book sections.
It’s such a slow process, this book unpacking business. Finding old friends and running hands over book jackets and spines, opening unknown books to look at illustrations and read short passages, removing bookmarks from previous uses over the years. Dusting. Sorting. Adding to their new home on the book shelf and adjusting and reordering as necessary. We are going to have to do a re-sort once the shelves are fully populated as we’ve got a complete mix on many of them.
And so it continues. Hugh thinks there are still about seventy unpacked boxes of books in the shed.
We’re going to need more bookcases..
Ravencroft Skye 
John and I used to have lots of books but after he died I realised that most of them were purely decorative. And unlike you we didn’t have doors on the bookcases so they needed more dusting than I had time for. A lot of my cookbooks had only one or two recipes I ever used so I copied out anything I wanted to keep and ditched the book.in the end I boxed up any I thought I wouldn’t read again and put them in the loft for 6 months. Covid came and they stayed there – some still languish up there! I thought I would miss them but I don’t. I do use the library a lot which is free and I can return the books once read. Occasionally I read one and think I will keep requesting it from time to time because I will go back to it – in which case I buy my own copy.
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That’s very sensible -and practical. Sadly most of our bookcases don’t have glass doors so I suspect will get dusty. It’s a good thing that neither of us are especially fussy about that. Library services here on the island are a bit sparse so I find comfort in having so many books here, even if I rarely read some of them.
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Love all those books – that is awesome!
We have a very large library as well. We have 6 avid readers (and 1 avid reader in the making) in the family and as the kids get older and older the books are multiplying even faster. We have everything from first readers, through first chapter books, books for teens and adults, and all sorts of fiction and non-fiction. Daniel keeps building more and more shelves and I keep looking for places where more shelves can be added.
Oldest son is about to move out and take his personal library with him, so he organized all his books using Zotero so he has a database of the them all. He finally convinced me to do ours and while it was a lot of work to set up, I have found it useful to help me when I am looking for something in a couple of ways. Number one, if I am unsure whether we own a certain book or not I can look it up and then have a basic idea of where on the shelves to look for it (based on the labels I entered for it). And secondly, when I need to look up a certain topic for the kids’ schooling, I can search them by that and will get a list of all we own that has that topic. It also helped me get rid of duplicates that we had.
The kids (4 of whom are all within a few years of launching out into the world) talk about bringing their kids back to “Nana’s Library” for books, and I am loving that picture. 🙂
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How wonderful. “Nana’s library” sounds as if it’s grown and nurtured a whole generation of family and is still going strong! Love it ❤️
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Unpacking boxes of books is such a slow process, it is so easy to be sucked into L space (Pratchett reference there). I have refined my library over the years into only a two room affair, but I won’t be rehoming any of my Pratchett.
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That would be sacrilege, I agree.
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