Having a finite amount of space, I have tried to cut back on book purchases. However, with the euro down and the various amazon.com outlets in Europe not repricing books I made some more acquisitions (Balzac's Comédie Humaine in 12 volumes, Rabelais in one volume, Corneille in 3 volumes, all from Pléiade, as well as Orlando Innamorato and volumes 18 and 19 of the Italian history series I've been buying, and Heinrich Mann's Professor Unrat and Karl May's 6-volume Orient series). *

This meant that I bought several large "Really Useful Boxes" and carefully stacked all of my old Dungeons & Dragons hardcovers into them, then moved them into my games closet, to make room. They stayed in a nice place, unlike the Jordan books and Martin books, which were thrown into boxes and banished to the garage and the tender mercies of silverfish (though I spray for bugs regularly).

There are books that are not perhaps the best, or the nicest, but I can't bring myself to remove them from the home library and send them to storage. A few crappy paperbacks of some H.P. Lovecraft stories I'm particularly fond of and can't find in hardcover, the Principia Discordia, a somewhat naive book about S&M, a few dubious "histories" of episodes of Russian history by sketchy authors that are probably pure fantasy, televangelist Jim Bakker's autobiography (signed by the author), a dry and used book on the Reformation I've had since college, Carlos Castaneda, a dog-eared book of Soviet propaganda in English...

So I guess I'll make it a survey since ultimately I'm wondering what other people do. Please elaborate as much as possible.

1. How do you make room for new books in your home?

2. If you get rid of old books, how do you figure out what to get rid of?

3. Are there books that you aren't sure why you keep but can't bear to get rid of or put into storage?





* Other than Orlando Innamorato, I was able to get all of the aforementioned books in hardcover.