My friend from church was a school librarian for thirty-one years, and she couldn’t give away a single book.
At school, she cleared out old books every summer. She knew which ones had to go, and she never felt bad about it.
But at home, her books filled four bookcases, two rows deep. They were stacked on the floor by her reading chair and in a box on her stairs.
“I can do it for the school,” she said. “I can’t do it for me.”
This fall, she finally did. Then she taught me the rule librarians use. I went home and found ten more books on my own shelves that I didn’t need. That surprised me, because I’d already sent eleven boxes of books out of our house this fall.
So this is the librarian’s rule for books. It’s how I learned to weed my home library, and I’m still reading every single night.
What Librarians Mean by Weeding
When a library takes old books off its shelves, librarians call it “weeding.” It works the same way weeding a garden does. You pull out what’s crowding the shelf, so the good books have room.
Libraries weed all the time. It keeps the shelves fresh, so people can find the books they want. A shelf packed with old, worn-out books makes it harder to find the good ones.