Today I put most of my old college books up for sale on Amazon. Those books were part of who I was back then, part of my identity. Asking me to sell those books would have been like asking me to sell my soul. I sold my plasma when I needed cash in college. I did not sell my books.
Some of it was simply class assignments. The 2 volume set of the history of the American people? For sale! Five Alice Walker novels? I couldn’t remember the plots of any besides The Color Purple. For sale!
Some more of it is political. Haciendo Caras: Making Face, Making Soul: the only Hispanic culture textbook available when I was in school. I was assigned to read it THREE times. Man, I got tired of being assigned that book. Hispanic culture didn’t mean much to me at that point. (Note to non-Women’s Studies majors: this admission constitutes heresy. I may never drink camomile tea in this town again).
Even more was political. Radical feminist texts on everything from sex to politics to religion to history to art to photography. Now on that account I kept the classics. Some habits don’t die. But anything that didn’t make me smile when I picked it up is now for sale on Amazon.com.
And many more standard English major classics: Madame Bovary and The Master and Margarita and The Stranger and Anna Karenina.
Oh, and did I really THROW AWAY Haciendo Caras? Yup. Threw out the copy of Fahrenheit 451 that I accidentally dipped in the bathtub ten years ago, too but felt so guilty about I kept it, sad little misbegotten drudge that it was, never to be re-read. The fate of my books that don’t get sold on Amazon is distinctly similar. A secret of librarianship: Not all books can be saved. Some really are just recycling. But shhhhhh! that’s a trade secret.
Plum Librarian LLC 