Back to those cookbooks

I'm having a hard time letting go of the excess cookbooks. I'm not sure why, can't yet pinpoint it. I have the cupboard set up for them, and I just need to choose which to keep and put them in the cupboard. So what is the hold-up?

I suppose I could choose the ones I think I'll use most, put them in the cupboard and store the rest for a set amount of time, selling them if I haven't referred to them in that time. I could do that, couldn't I?

They're just books. They're not magic. They're just paper and ink, and who knows if the recipes are even any good? I sure don't, I haven't tried most of them. How could one? To cook every recipe in a cookbook could take years. Years. Remember that book I mentioned a while back, Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, about a New Yorker who decided to give her life meaning by cooking every recipe in volume 1 of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume One? It took her a year, and it was sometimes a miserable one, to cook every recipe in that admittedly large, book. I do not want to spend a year of my life doing that. In fact, most of what I cook is made up by me, as I'm doing the cooking. Why do I even have cookbooks?

Still, I'll move these books. I'll stow what fits upstairs. The rest will be tucked into a basement storage cupboard, to be reassessed in three months. Seasons change after all, and I do almost no baking in the summer. I might need those cookie books in a few months, when the fall holidays come.

Cookbook Clutter: Update

I've been pondering the cookbook situation. As Clutter Buddy pointed out, most of us use only a few of our cookbooks. This is true for me, that's for sure. But, I like cookbooks as literature, as inspiration. I just don't want to have as many of them as I currently own.

Recall I did cull cookbooks a while ago. I sold about two dozen of them, ones I rarely even looked at for ideas. What I need to do next is to cull the remaining books, and be ruthless. I have designated ONE spot for cookbooks, and it's not huge.

...and out the door they go!

I took those books (one box, one large bag) straight to the local used/new bookstore. They pay half again as much for trade as for cash, so I took the trade for the books they could use. The rest will go to the second best buying used/new bookstore. Then, the good condition paperbacks will be listed on paperback swap; the rest of them will be donated. There's a book exchange at a local library and at a couple of local coffee shops, I might try that this time instead of the thrift store.

What shall I choose for my store credit?

Book Purging!

After talking about books with my LJ friend Frabjouslinz, I decided to do some purging. I pulled books I've read that I have no interest in reading again. I pulled books I've owned for years and yet not read. I grabbed back issues of Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine. Books for subjects I'm no longer interested in.

And what do you know? When I was done, and it was time for bed, I felt so great! As if a weight I didn't know I'd been carrying had fallen off my back.

Before going to sleep, I paged through the latest O magazine. Found a great little article by Julie Morgenstern, an except from her latest book, When Organizing Isn't Enough: SHED Your Stuff, Change Your Life. She writes about how, when she changed professions from theater to professional organizer, she kept boxes of her theater books, storing them under her dining room table. Her business had plateaued and she was frustrated. One evening, she decided to sort through one box of her theater stuff. She ended up tossing all but a couple of her old scripts. Soon after, her business blossomed. All that old stuff, from another life, had been holding her back.

Nice empty spots on the shelves (which had been double and triple stacked)