No room on the shelf
I’ve posted about our book collection here before.
We have too many. Most of the time, we’re ok with that but on occasion we lose track, particularly with those books I’ve not catalogued: The “travel bookcase”.
All of this has been prompted by our conversations about our upcoming travel plans for this Summer. Since we’ll celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary this year, we thought it could be fun to revisit our honeymoon destination of Scotland. Not only that, but we’ve been talking about exploring Northern Ireland too and we thought the combination would make for an interesting road trip. So, we did as we usually do and retrieved the Irish guidebooks from our shelf and realised we needed to buy something for Scotland.
Interesting isn’t it, however much inspiration and information there is online, there are times when a “real” guidebook is just so much easier. No adverts for a start!
We both muttered as we retrieved those guidebooks though, that this shelf in particular was overstuffed with double rows of books, many of them out of date.
Time for a sort out?
There’s no gain without pain though! We emptied the shelf onto the floor, doing a rough sort as we went…Europe, British Isles, USA, Asia, Australia and NZ….before realising how old some of these guidebooks were. Just how long is the life of a guidebook?
When it contains treasure such as this (from a trip to Venice in February 1991 - or 19901 as the six year old artist would claim) I’m pleased to say it stayed a few years. Just what to throw away/recycle and what to keep?
The answer in this case was the recycle the book and keep that lovely page!
Over the course of a couple of days, we went through every book, deciding whether it was worth keeping or not. Some, very specific regional guides remain useful for inspiration and general information whereas those such as the more general “Fodors Europe 2004” with all the hotel and restaurant listings have very much been overtaken by the internet.
Having done the sort out, we began to put them all back - doing our best to create some kind of order from the chaos. Miraculously, they (more or less) all fitted, allowing my notebooks and the 2020 listings from the National Trust, English Heritage and Artfund to sit in front. The road maps in particular were brutally culled as my Hero observed how quickly they become outdated (and admitted that he liked buying new maps, anyway)
As the last book was squeezed into place, we sat back and appreciated the new found order. So much better now we can see everything and know what we have.
But it didn’t last long. Remember those thoughts about a Scottish/Irish Anniversary road trip? After putting together a draft itinerary, we each admitted that we didn’t feel as excited by the prospect as we usually do. Forty years together enabled each of us to recognise the unwritten signs on the other one’s face!
As he frequently does, my Hero came up with a far more attractive alternative - somewhere we’ve wanted to explore for quite some time.
No, we didn’t have a single guidebook or map of Galicia. (We have now!) Our Summer travel plans are in place, flights, rental car and hotels are all booked too.
That single row arrangement of guidebooks didn’t last long, did it?
