What can old people do with all their books?

But the sad truth is that no one wants their beloved accumulations. Many of the over-70s are downsizing, and moving into units or retirement homes, where there’s literally no room for their books. One friend who is moving into a new sunset village in the neighbourhood offered her entire book collection to the home’s library (most have one), only to be greeted with dismay from a manager: "Please, no more books! We can’t accommodate any more!"

So, what to do with all these loved but now not-wanted books? School fairs have a second-hand book section, but these are dismal affairs, smelly offerings such as Reader’s Digest condensed books, trash by Dan Brown and his ilk, encyclopaedia sets and tatty Mills and Boons. Hardly anyone wants these. Proper books are rare. Book fairs are swamped with donated books, the church hall which is the usual venue has mountains of them, but a minimum of buyers and no one under 60. Presumably the unsold books are dumped.

What about a second-hand book shop? There are many excellent stores throughout New Zealand. But if you’re culling your collection, be prepared to be offered only a fraction of a book’s original price – if the shop wants them in the first place.

Occasionally too, this outlet can produce unexpected surprises. An author friend of mine noticed among the fiction shelves one of his own novels. He picked it up curiously, to check its asking price. Seventeen dollars. Fair enough, he thought, it’s still a fine book. Then he noticed that the novel had been inscribed. By himself. The inscription read, “To my old friend [named], who has always supported my writing endeavours”. Evidently this support did not extend to his retaining of his personally autographed copy.

(The late great New Zealand writer AK Grant, after inscribing many of his very fine books but finding that the supply greatly exceeded demand, then offered, as an additional incentive to sell the remaining copies, the tag-line, “Un-signed copies are extremely rare.”)   

I’ve recently discovered a novel way of disposing of people’s book mountains. In Wicklow Road, Narrow Neck, there is a double-sided bus shelter that dates I guess from the 1940s. No bus has stopped there for decades, but the building is still sound and weather-proof. And it’s lately become a repository for unwanted books. There are hundreds of them there, free to a good home. And among the inevitable Dan Browns and the Georgette Heyers are books of real quality. This morning, for example, I picked up from the bus shelter a copy of A Mistake by Carl Shuker, which was short-listed for last year’s Ockham Book Awards. The Wicklow Road vintage bus-shelter-cum-free-book-depository has evidently become popular with Narrow Neck locals, and no wonder. It’s a great neighbourhood resource.

A culling of my own book collection is inevitable. But this presents unbearable dilemmas. Which books to keep? Which to throw out? Certainly not the books inscribed by their authors. These take up a special section of my collection. Among them are books by Frank Sargeson, Emily Perkins, Vincent O’Sullivan, Charlotte Grimshaw, Peter Bland, Michael King, Karyn Hay and Stephanie Johnson, to mention only a few. These are far too precious to be parted with.  

So, I move on to the un-inscribed books. Surely some of these can go? My shelving is catalogued only roughly, but there is a Bryson section, and a Gee section and a Frame section. None of those are going.

Older rows contain in paperback editions Evelyn Waugh, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway. Some of these I haven’t read in years, but they hold such abiding memories that I cannot bear to part with them. Their pages may be yellowed, but they are still a treasured part of my reading history. Then there are the literary magazines, the Landfalls, Islands and others, where my short stories first appeared. Throw them out? Not likely. They remain unculled.

All this means that the book mountain remains intact. The very idea of my books ending up in a rubbish skip, then a landfill, fills me with horror. It would be like seeing old friends taken out and buried alive. So for the time being, three-quarters of a lifetime of books remain on their shelves, spines forever outward, timeless and still tempting.

Postscript by ReadingRoom literary editor Steve Braunias: Graeme Lay is absolutely right. We are living in an age of mountains of unwanted books. Many are destined for the tip, at best for recycling.

As the most extreme example, there has been the ongoing scandal and disgrace of government philistines culling 600,000 books from the National Library; vague and half-baked attempts were made to place a recent shipment of 57,000 books at a Lions sale in Trentham but most remained unsold and presumably destroyed. Probably even greater numbers of books in the nation's households are facing the same fate as an ageing population, as Graeme Lay describes, need to downsize.

Some second-hand bookstores are receptive and sensitive; some are absolute f***ing sharks. Warwick Jordan from Hard to Find (premises in Auckland, and Dunedin) is very much in the former camp. I asked him about old people coming to him with their collections, and he replied, "We are in effect surrogate grief counsellors as part of the transaction - people often genuinely grieve when selling their books in those circumstances, either the surrender of their treasured collection, or parting with a departed partner’s treasures. We spend a lot of time talking people through the process, and the over-riding feeling is often not focused on price at all but on an appreciation of the books or the person and that the books will be intrinsically valued and find new homes ... Sooner or later that shift comes to us all."

For the past three years I've eroded my own mountain of books by setting up a book stall at the annual Te Atatu South Country Fair. (I applied for a stall at the night markets in Te Atatu peninsula, where I live, but the petty, illiterate bourgeoisie who run the markets told me to get lost.) I probably take in something like 400 books to the fair. Every year, I'm left with about 50-60 unsold books; and when I pack up, I chuck them in recycling bins at the fair. It's brutal but there are too many books in the world and a lot are regarded, rightly, as junk, as good for nothing, as scrap paper.

Never mind! I always have a great time at the Te Atatu South Country Fair; it's awesome to sell and talk about books with complete strangers, and for literature to be a part of the fun and the happiness of people coming together.