The book donation program at my library is not just a means of receiving books; it has also become, even more, a mechanism for disposing of excess. As a volunteer, you think of yourself as cultivating a neat little garden, not unlike that small monastic library of the Middle Ages.
Every Wednesday I head over to my local library where I volunteer in sorting donated books. It is an occupation that puts me in contact with the remarkable, and indeed overwhelming, amount of junk our civilization has produced. Although we would prefer to receive loads of quality books, and this often does happen, just as often customers use the donation resource as a means simply of clearing out their homes. As people move or pass on or simply do their spring cleaning, the library becomes the dumping ground for the books that are no longer wanted.
Naturally we try to establish rules: no textbooks, no novels published before a certain date, no books that are not in decent physical condition. But the rules are frequently ignored, and the result is that many books must be dumped in the recycle bin.
This is no great loss, and causes me no sadness, because I am not of the opinion that the book is automatically sacred. Rather, books have many degrees of quality and usefulness and as such should be evaluated like any other human artifact. In fact, I rejoice in the act of throwing out some books and instating others on the shelves. I see this as an act of reason and discernment, an instance of the creation of order to which we human beings are called. It is part of the necessary economy and management of the world around us, similar to maintaining cleanly surroundings. Just as there is a landscape, so I would argue there is a book-scape, the environment of existing books. In this world one can discern many geological layers, defined by the evolution (or possibly devolution) of taste, intellect, and style.
Once upon a time, producing books was an arduous and difficult task involving hand-copying works word for word. This was a task usually performed by the monks, the traditional keepers of the flame of knowledge. They devoted long and concentrated hours to their scribal work and often made their books beautiful works of art. In our home growing up we had framed in the hallway two original pages from a medieval illuminated manuscript of the Psalms. (My mother’s aunt had known the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and obtained the manuscripts when the museum had an excess of them, although I can hardly imagine having an excess of medieval manuscripts.) It is humbling to look at the pages and think of the brothers sitting in their scriptorium over 500 years ago penning them, with their fancy initial letters filled with red and blue ink and shaped into stylized flourishes.
The upshot of all this painstaking work is that the books in circulation were few: the Bible, of course, as well as a select group of Christian and classical texts—the monks were instrumental in preserving the great pre-Christian literature of Greece and Rome for posterity.
All this changed with the arrival of the printing press in the Renaissance, which allowed books to be mass-produced. With every advance there is a trade-off, and so with the wider dissemination of books and knowledge comes at times a cheapening, a dilution of the wonder of books. By most accounts, the books published in America every year number in the hundreds of thousands. And who is reading them? My impression is that more and more books are being created for fewer and fewer readers.
This highlights a central feature of modern life, the overproduction of stuff. We live in the midst of stuff. Material stuff and the stuff of the mind: there is too much of both. This is in large measure the fruit of technology, starting with the printing press. Jacques Barzun, in his popular work From Dawn to Decadence, has a choice quote from Voltaire about cultural decline: “Decadence was brought about by the easy way of producing works and laziness in doing it, by the surfeit of fine art and the love of the bizarre.”
Leaving aside for a moment the surfeit of fine art and love of the bizarre, I think we can agree that the ease of publishing books has led to a surfeit. I feel this every time I check the library donation bins. There one finds an avalanche of novels, mysteries, self-help books, cookbooks, travel books, health guides, books on religion, books on history, books on science, and much else.
All are mixed more or less indiscriminately together, although often you can tell that a particular donator has a fixed interest: an ex-military person might donate a cartload of military history books, for example, and then you have the murder-mystery fanatics. But aside from the books of outstanding quality and interest, the majority appear nondescript, generic, and repetitive. I scratch my head over why we need so many books about being successful in business or losing weight. The gems are few, and it is the volunteer’s job to spot them amid the deluge of the dated and ephemeral.
Classics, the books that both endure and endear, are not nearly so many as I would like. Our donations shelves accord exactly one row to this most important category of book. Whenever I see one in the bin my spirits lift, but then I have to consider its condition: an excessively worn and dog-eared copy of Plato is not going to make the grade. And even if a classic does meet the standards, it will not necessarily move off the shelves. When I find that someone has cast off The Journals of Kierkegaard, I do wonder if anyone else is likely to take it up. (Oftentimes I will take the book myself.) I have seen books sit on the donation shelves for months, even years, unclaimed. What will happen to them?
This causes its own kind of melancholy, for I realize that these even great books remain unread by many. I think back to “The Mutability of Literature,” in which Washington Irving lamented the mortality of literary works, lying unknown on dusty shelves though celebrated during the lifetime of the authors. Irving would be even more melancholy today, as whole swaths of culture and literature once central to people’s lives seem all but forgotten.
In weighing whether to keep a book or not, I become aware of having power of life or death over these items. It is a Final Judgment over which I am presiding. I wonder, when confronted by an especially rare or unusual book, if it might be the only copy in existence. If I throw it away, would I be consigning it to oblivion? Many rare books live shadowy existences in the libraries or collections of private citizens. Many others are listed for sale on the web, publicly visible items in the marketplace of books. Perhaps they have a chance of surviving and finding a happy home.
Whatever the case, the sheer quantity of books and the lack of any central message to them brings me an acute malaise when I face the library donation bins. And then I realize the nature of the mission: to bring order to chaos. What is truly of value in this bewildering mess? You must discern and decide.
“Clear your mind of cant,” advised Dr. Johnson. Fine advice, and I would add that we must also declutter our homes and environments of many of the products (both material and immaterial) that our civilization has thrown up at us. If we do, just maybe we will find that our minds are a bit clearer too.
The book donation program at my library is not just a means of receiving books; it has also become, even more, a mechanism for disposing of excess. As a volunteer, you think of yourself as cultivating a neat little garden, not unlike that small monastic library of the Middle Ages. You are replenishing the ecosystem of books, keeping things clean and clear and manageable.
Increasingly the world of culture is becoming too complex to deal with. We must therefore enter a state of concentration, in which we cherish and study closely what we have rather than producing and consuming more, more, more.
Abundance is good—when it is part of God’s creation or man’s creative reflection of it. But abundance can become too much of a good thing when it becomes redundant, when questions of quality and importance and inspiration go by the wayside. We should exercise greater discernment about what, and how much, we are producing and consuming, and put on the brakes if necessary. If we had a library that consisted solely of, say, the Bible and some St. Augustine and Shakespeare, would it be in any way incomplete?
There are some minds that celebrate abundance, production, and endless choices as unqualifiedly good things. I have my doubts. I tend to think that smaller is better and that when one’s world gets overly complex one must take steps to simplify and circumscribe it. That is part of what we try to do with the donations. What books do we accept? Classics have priority, at least as long as I have any say. I don’t like to put anything out for sale that is not aesthetically pleasing, that does not present well on the shelf; this translates to books that have been well cared for. Relevance and timelessness (which perhaps are the same thing) are essential.
In my home is another order, another domain, where the same practice applies. At home I also collect books, and I continually seek to renew the collection, give it shape and order and point. It is a pleasurable and satisfying activity because, as I see it, the order you give your external surroundings (a library, for instance) fosters an inner order in the soul.
This is necessary because the invention, fecundity, and enterprising curiosity that have defined Western civilization for ages have lately become its bane. The material that human beings produce needs to be proportionate to the ability of the human psyche to take it in, and we have far exceeded that. The remedy must be to withdraw into solitude, to create an inner order. One can construct a cultural order of one’s own, and share it with others. One may well have to do this in solitude, like the monks who brought us the good and essential books.
The difference between the monks and the moderns is that the monks created books out of love and devotion, patience and persistence (the very act of creating a book required those qualities) whereas we merely produce in a mechanical way. When a thing because too easy to do and hence done too frequently, it becomes diluted and devalued. In this way we end up with the absurd paradox of an ocean of books and few readers.
The sad fact is that culture has been sliced into smaller and smaller bits, tiny subcultures, and special interests to the extent that any common culture has disappeared, and this is mirrored in the over-proliferation of books.
Books as a source of style
There are other losses too, other things that go by the wayside in the rush of constant production, and one of these is style. You end up with something like Dr. Jordan Peterson’s recent book about God: sound moral insights, dense spiritual and philosophical ideas… and no style at all. Content unadorned, without stylistic graces, is to me like cooking a fine and nutritious meal and serving it in an iron skillet and tin cups. I think style is important, and I won’t live in a world without it. A serious thinking adult should care about manner no less than matter, for after a certain point the medium is identical with the message.
With good style and expression out of the picture, we fall into the twin extremes of crude monosyllables and bloviating academic verbosity. What eludes us is the succinct, elegantly formed, yet substantive utterance that you find in writers of the past, from ancient times to the mid-20th century.
But what is the nature of this elusive style which I hold up as an ideal? It is not easy to characterize, but here is a try: eloquence, wisdom, true rhetoric, wrapped up in elegance and charm. It is, in a word, the style of humane letters.
I think we have all met someone who embodies such style in his or her life. He or she could be a teacher, professor, or an ordinary person. No less can this sense of style be radiated through books, through an authorial personality. At its best, such a presence conveys a feeling that I have always identified with the world of books, that of endless leisure: a contemplation unlimited by time or responsibility.
The stylelessness of contemporary life drives one back to the small shelf of classics, where one can find examples of great styles to live by. It reminds us that we are all, especially now, epigones of the Great Tradition, standing on the shoulders of giants—a feeling that instills humility and awe.
To toil in the library donation bin is, in part, to work in the office of literary waste management. This has its satisfactions, but with it comes a much deeper joy, which is that of keeping the finest books and treasuring them in your heart.
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