THE GREAT BOOK DEACCESSION

Books are precious to their owners. Their worth, emotional and monetary, is comparably less to anyone else.

Humorist and social critic Fran Lebowitz owns 12,000 books, mostly fiction, kept in 19th-century wooden cases with glass doors in her New York apartment. Constitutionally, I am unable to throw a book away. To me, it's like seeing a baby thrown in a trash can, she says. I am a glutton for print. I love books in every way. I love them more than most human beings. If there's a book she doesn't want, Lebowitz, 72, will spend months deciding whom to give it to.

I kept accumulating books. My life was overflowing with books. I'd have to live to 150 to reread these books, says Martha Frankel, a writer and director of the Woodstock Bookfest. She amassed 3,600 — and that was just in the office that she closed in 2018 — but the idea of getting rid of these books made me nauseous.

America is saturated with old books, congesting Ikea Billy cases, Jengaing atop floors, Babeling bedside tables. During months of quarantine, book lovers faced all those spines and opportunities for multiple seasons of spring cleaning. They adore these books, irrationally, unconditionally, but know that, ultimately, if they don't decide which to keep, it will be left to others to unceremoniously dump them.

And so, despite denial, grief, bargaining, anguish and even nausea, the Great Deaccession commenced.

This is the most material flooding onto the market that I've ever seen, says veteran Vancouver, Wash., dealer KolShaver, a sentiment shared by sellers across the country. For dealers who survived the pandemic, the used-book business has never been healthier, says Wonder Book owner Chuck Roberts, a 42-year veteran in the trade, strolling through his three-acre warehouse, a veritable biblio wonderland, jammed with volumes ranging from never-been-cracked publishers' overstock to centuries-old classics bound in leather.

We take everything and pretty much what no one else is going to take, Roberts says, which is how his business accumulated an inventory of 6 million, with 300,000 more new used books arriving every month. Wonder Book practices nose-to-tail bookselling, meaning a home or use is found for each item one way or the other through multiple internet sites (national and international), three brick-and-mortar stores, school and charitable donations. Wonder Book's damaged items on life support are pulped to produce 100,000 pounds monthly of recycled paper.

Despite the advent of the digerati and eBooks, hardcovers and paperbacks continue to flood the market for readers who prefer the look and feel of physical books, the weight in their hands, the pleasure of turning a page. Three-quarters of trade book revenue last year derived from hardcover and paperback sales, according to the Association of American Publishers.

What to do with old books is a quandary that collectors, no matter what age, eventually face — or leave to their heirs who, truly, do not want the bulk of them.

Most people haven't a clue as to how many books they own. Possibly, they don't want to know. Roberts routinely make house calls to owners claiming to own 2,000 books only to discover a quarter of that.

Or vice versa. Drexel University law professor Clare Coleman thought she owned 1,300 books until her book group reminded her that she owned twice that many, given that her Billy shelves were stacked two deep.

To read the complete article, see:
We're drowning in old books. But getting rid of them is heartbreaking. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/12/19/used-books-stores-donation-fran-lebowitz/)

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