Oh dear. I replied to a question on Threads, which was asking what to do with a collection of right-wing media. I suggested that it ought to be burned.
imajazzbaby: I am in a quandary. I am currently cheating clearing out my late father’s house. His red neck MAGA house. It’s actually not too bad, flags, war eagles, “United We Stand” stickers on the windows. But there’s a huge stack of Dennis Prager books. Plus the complete works of Ayn Rand 🤮
I don’t believe in burning books. But I don’t want to donate that crap and send it out into the world either.
Any ideas on what to do with them?
pzmyers: Nothing is sacred. Burn the trash. You are not saying others can’t read them (although they shouldn’t) but that you are decluttering your personal property.
I am sorry that your father had such poor taste in books. That does not mean you are obligated to propagate it.
Note: this is very different from denying others the right to read these books — no one is obligated to preserve every item a deceased parent once owned, and that includes books. I’m going to have to clean out my mother’s bookshelves, and she used to be a regular reader of books, mostly detective stories, murder mysteries, that sort of thing. They’re all getting tossed, one way or another. I know well that irrational feeling that every item the loved one touched should be preserved and passed on to generation after generation, but I don’t think my children, or my children’s children, would actually be grateful to someday inherit a few houses full of old stuff.
Here’s a completely different situation:
“Hundreds of New College of Florida library books, including many on LGBTQ+ topics and religious studies, are headed to a landfill,” Sarasota Herald Tribune reports.
“A dumpster in the parking lot of Jane Bancroft Cook Library on the campus of New College overflowed with books and collections from the now-defunct Gender and Diversity Center on Tuesday afternoon. Video captured in the afternoon showed a vehicle driving away with the books before students were notified. In the past, students were given an opportunity to purchase books that were leaving the college’s library collection.”
Purging a library of every book on certain topics is a whole ‘nother ball of wax. Traditionally, they ought to have all the jugend gathered around a bonfire.
By the way, I have a bookshelf full of truly awful creationist books, and I’m not sure what to do with them. I’d leave them to a library as a historical resource, but not if they would just check them out to readers who might consider them validated because they are in a formal collection. I’ll probably suggest that they be incinerated or placed in a landfill.
Is this a regional thing? Books can be recycled. For your mother’s books, there are lots of places to donate books in the Seattle area.
No.
Don’t do that.
Don’t toss them, recycle them.
I’ve dealt with this twice recently as people’s parents die or they have to downsize for one reason or another.
You can always find a place for mainstream books somewhere.
.1. One of the local thrift stores of which there are probably many in the south Seattle area.
After sorting through a storage locker, my friend and I had 20 boxes of books, ranging from signed author copies down to the usual mystery/science fiction paper backs.
I took them to my favorite local thrift store.
I was afraid I might overload them but they didn’t even blink at them.
And, most of them sold pretty rapidly.
.2. Goodwill takes old books.
There are Goodwill stores in the Kent area.
.3. Our local public library has a big bin where you can donate books. Several times a year they have public book sales where they sell them all and donate the money to the library.
.4. Some used bookstores might take some of them.
I found that they were really selective though and it wasn’t the best place to even make an attempt
We managed to recycle two very large personal libraries this way.
The hardest books to get rid of were old textbooks. These were biology, chemistry, math, anthropology, etc..
Because they become obsolete and so what good are they?
We ended up throwing those into the local recycling bin for paper.
I took all my old christian books to the recycling centre, so they’ll have been pulped.
Things like detective fiction usually sell pretty well in second hand bookstores, it might be worth checking if there were any local to your mum who would take the lot. The exception are the ones that were incredibly popular, like the Da Vinci Code, but a lot of second hand book stores will even take them if you are offering everything else. When my dad died we loaded up the boot and drove it down to the second handbook store, they took what they wanted then the rest got taken to the recycling centre on the way back for another load, but there were enough people to do this, so it does depend on who is around and can help.
If the L. Ron Hubbard books manage to survive for a millennium, the scientists who find them will get very confused. I wold recommend saving them just for that reason.
I’m not sure why so many people treat books as being some sort of sacred relic. It isn’t a sin to want to get rid of books you’ve read or are never going to read. Choosing to recycle a book at the local library or a used bookstore is a fine idea, if you’re so inclined. So is offering children’s books to daycare centers. Tossing them into the paper recycling bin is also acceptable. Throwing them into the landfill is not a good idea and burning them yourself is perhaps the worst idea, if for nothing more than the pollution caused by burning. And, yes, that applies to literature offering viewpoints you disagree with. Paper recycling is the preferred destination for that.
PZ, check out local recycling tips.
Hennepin County Libraries had this to say about recycling:
Recycle paperback books
Paperback books may be recycled in your recycling program at home.
Put hardcover books in garbage
Hardcover books should be put in the garbage. They are not accepted for recycling because their binding makes them difficult to recycle.
We dealt with this when we were figuring out what to do with the old textbooks.
It varies with location.
Some recycling programs don’t like you to put hardcover books into the paper bin.
What you can do is…remove the hard covers to put in the landfill and throw the interior pages into the paper recycling bin.
Which is tedious if you have 5 boxes of them.
We called our local recycling corporation and they said hardcovers are fine, just toss them in. That made it easy
OK, recycling is good!
Instead of burning books by right wingers I’d say donate them to a library. If in good condition or recent they might switch out for a worn or damaged copy they already have. Ayn Rand popularity waxes and wanes. I own plenty of her books. Or instead they might put them into the booksale collection. If someone buys it the money goes towards the Friends or something library related. I’ve bought right wing books from a library book sale out of curiosity or to hate read.
The brief skim of articles about the New College of Florida book dumping sounds appalling. Did they make an attempt to at least sell or give them to interested parties? Maybe some of the books were dated or in bad condition, but to me this looks like it was targeting content the right wing Desantis plants wanted to purge for content. They couldn’t have kept some of it for examples of stuff to despise and hate read from their POV, no? I thought that’s what free speech is supposed to cultivate, a sense for challenging your own views or at least develop an informed if still biased opinion.
There’s also upcycling where if crafty enough you can make stuff out of torn out pages like flowers or other things, limited only by imagination. Some libraries do this. Imagine some collage or floral display with pages from an explicit romance book or an author who says “fuck” every other word. A thing of beauty.
Who would do such a thing?
Sen. Josh Hawley Clashes With Opponent Lucas Kunce At Missouri State Fair
If the creationist and Ayn Rand Books are going to be in a library they should be in a section titled “psychiatric case studies.”
My location has a used book sale, run by the local ‘Friends of the Library’ organization. It turns out King County, WA has a similar setup.
King County Library System: Friends of the Library
As a resident of Missouri, I find Hawley a major embarrassment.
I once burned a paperback in a coffee can, to test if it’d condense for disposal. What started as a tidy cellulose brick—after a long wait—became the same volume of messy black confetti plus a LOT of smoke and embers. Lighter maybe. Would not recommend.
+1 for recycling
When my mother in law died I joined her 14 children in tidying up the house. Among the possessions was a substantial library of primarily religious texts belonging to my father-in-law who died well before I met my wife. Only my wife was interested in keeping them so I sorted through them discarding ones which had been severely eaten by bookworms. She talked very fondly of how he would finish his day by sitting quietly smoking his pipe and reading. As I was sorting through them I discovered he did more than read, he also annotated them and wrote short summaries and commentaries on them. I would love to have read them to get to know him but sadly I did not speak his language. My wife reminisces fondly of him and he sounds like he was a wonderful parent as was her mother, a small woman who had some of her children while under Japanese occupation.
Pass your mothers books on I’m sure someone would appreciate them. As for the brainfarts of Ayn Rand and Denis Prager I’d shred them and use them in the chicken coop.
Somewhere, a long time ago, I read that olde timee book lovers, would store currency between the pages of their books.
Have you flipped through all of them???
As to leaving stuff for the kids: all the adult children I know, including my own, say they want nothing. When you grow up with abundance, stuff loses importance
Two years ago my parents sold their home of 35 years to move into assisted living, and they had a 90-year lifetime of accumulated stuff to dispose of. That disposal was by far the most traumatic part of the move for my mum. (My dad was past caring at that point.)
All things considered, it went very well, with the grandkids taking enough of the furniture to make Mum reasonably happy, and as much as possible going to charity shops (this is in the UK) and recycling.
The biggest issue was the “valuables” — heirlooms in the form of antique furniture which Mom believed to be valuable but an auctioneer invited to take stock barely even looked at. Nothing worth over $100 when she was expecting items to be in the hundreds at least. That was pretty brutal for her on top of the stress of letting go. Sentimental value can be like that at times.
The one heirloom we trashed immediately was an antique money box where you pulled at handle and a “Little N-word Boy” ate the coin placed in his hand. The words were embossed on the front of the box. I remember playing with it when I was a boy visiting my grandparents, completely oblivious about its racist nature. Good riddance.
We found out that the British Heart Foundation does house clearances (for a fee) and that’s where the remaining furniture and stuff we couldn’t dispose of went, so at least a charity benefited instead of a business.
Two years later Mum is still sorting through the boxes filled with photos, documents, and memorabilia of her and Dad’s lives together. It’s a long job for someone in their 90s. But at least this final part has been cathartic for her. Dad died last year and going through all the things she kept for sorting has brought back so many happy memories for her.
The three of us children have all sworn not to leave the task of clearing our homes to our children (or in my case, nephews and nieces) after such a monumental job, but what are the odds we’ll keep our promise on that one?
I understand the supposed quandary, but burning books that are literal (and verifiable) lies, versus burning books you just don’t like are worlds apart. When I peruse the “Little Libraries” in my town, and I encounter lying books and false propaganda, I have no problem with “borrowing” them, and not necessarily turning them back in on time. I’ll pay the fines.
Then book market in Denmark used to be heavily regulated, still is but it’s been liberalized.
In olden days only bookshops could selling Danish books. The publishers had great power.
Books are mostly a fleeting commodity, this year’s bestseller is a waste of of space next year. So today make room for the new books there was another official nation wide book sale once a year in all book sellers.
Then outgoing titles weren’t markedet down, sometimes ridiculously so. Think black Friday scenes at the locally book shop.
What would happen tomorrow the books on sale after this blow out sale?
The rest of the books would be offered to their author at the a greatly reduced price, and what was left would be burned.
At one point point they book warehouses where books were stored would be heater in them winter by burning redundant stock.
That image is a stronger one’s for me. Last year’s books burning to keep next summers hit books warm!
How would it have been if the library had recycled or otherwise disposed of only the putative right-wing material and left the rest for students pick over?
You can always hollow out the books and create cool hiding places.
Hand the leftover books to Beavis and Butt-head, give them a box of matches and tell them to do what comes naturally.
I’ve read a few really bad books and tossed them in the trash afterward. Now I wish I’d kept them, just to use as bad examples.
I suppose it depends on where you are and what the recycling possibilities are, but where I am you can just throw them in with the recyclable plastics and papers, and it’s highly unlikely any will be recovered. I used to live in a town with a recycling trailer, where many books ended up, and must confess i got a lot of good books from there, but dumpsters are less likely to be rummaged. Plenty of ways to disable a book you don’t want read again. Leave it out in the rain, shred it and use it as garden mulch. If, like one or two posters here, you have a bandsaw, just cut them all in half. Or cut the spines off and mix the now loose pages in a big trash bag. Or just tear it apart and distribute the bits in separate bags.
Hollowing out is a good solution for a few, if they’re fat enough. When I was a kid, we had one called “Myron T. Herrick, Friend of France” in which a small amount of cash was held. If I needed gas money or something, I would be told to ask Myron.
Here we have a couple. One of them is “Speaking My MInd,” known now as “Reagan’s Brain.”
Welcome to the new dark ages! There is such a huge war going on to control the behavior and thoughts of everyone by the rtwingnut xtian terrorists. Of course, it has always been that way.
I say: My books, my choice! But, I’ll not deny your right to read whatever you want. (no matter how asinine it is)
Before Pharyngula moved to this site, it was at …something I have forgotten.
One of the other blogs dredged up a horrible white power book written by a twentysomething. I think it was called “White Apocalypse” and based on the assumption that archaeologists had found- and suppresswd- evidence of prehistoric white people in North America that had been massacred by the invading untermenschen.
Chigau @17
I used to put old Bizarro cartoons (rotated off the refrigerator) in my dictionary. Always good for a laugh when I had to look up something. I wonder who got that book.
My brother’s made some art that way, and sold a few pieces. Page from Strunk & White with all the words struck through except for “omit unnecessary words,” and some others using Fahrenheit 451.
The only 2 books I’ve ever wanted to burn was the first in the Left Behind series and 50 Shades of Gray. Neither because of the subject matter (which I thought was creepy but I was curious) but because they both were so poorly written I couldn’t finish the books
Please donate your mom’s detective books to an assisted living or nursing facility for their library. Others will enjoy them.
The situation at New College is awful. Decades to build something wonderful and meaningful, a few years for a horrific nasty jerk to destroy it.