Difficult Decisions about Thinning One's Book Collection

I have written (4/1/10) about the struggle to know when to keep books and when (because of space issues, mostly) to get rid of (give away) books. I had this discussion with my friend and professional colleague P when I visited her recently; her house is crammed with books and journals and she doesn’t have enough space to put them all. She said that she knew she should thin her collection, and was making some halfhearted efforts to do so. But as a prolific academic writer, she uses her books more regularly than most of us do. Many of us say about books or other items that we keep, despite not having used them for years, that “you never know when you might need them.” In her case, this statement is actually apt. Despite that, I urged her to trim her collection a bit, saying that there must be books and journals that she really would never use again. She said she would try, but clearly she was hesitant. Soon after my visit, P let me know in a humorous email that not only once but twice the day after my visit, she had needed to find a passage or reference and had been able to find them in books she hadn’t looked at for years. And then, ironically, she suddenly found she needed an article that happened to be in the one journal she had managed to get rid of, as she seldom used material in the subdiscipline it represented. This matter of deciding what to keep and what to let go is a tough one!