Books! Everywhere Books

Books. Everywhere I look there are books!

This week we are sorting out our books. Over the last 25 years of marriage, 4 children and going back to study, we have managed to amass a small library’s worth.

We have run out of space on the shelves. Thank goodness for kindle! There are nearly 800 on my kindle.

My son and I are big readers and I often find it difficult to get rid of books. My son often rereads his a number of times. This means keeping some is definitely a necessity.  I know that the library is just down the road from me and this would be a solution. The problem is I tend to forget to return them and can often go months past the return date!

I love books

The solution for me was this.  I get books from my mother in law after she has finished reading her book club books.   I belong to a book club. My mother has an extensive library at the retirement village where she lives.  As well as this there is a great thing called book bub http://www.bookbub.com where I can download to my kindle at extremely reasonable prices or even free from Amazon. I read very quickly and can go through a 400 page book in about 8 hours.

This week’s mission and in my house it will be a joint mission for the 6 of us, is to sort and clear up the books shelves.

The first task is deciding how the shelves will be arranged and categorised.

Sorting your books

The next step is going through all the books and finding the ones that are damaged.  Some will need rebinding and others will go for recycling as they are too damaged to read and these are most likely to be the toddler and baby ones. Once children learn to use scissors and pens it is almost as if the books call to them and say “come and cut out the pictures” or “colour all over the pages”.

Step 3 will be collecting all the books that you no longer want. These are books the children have out grown and books that are obsolete. I have a set of Encyclopaedias with the last update in 1976! My youngest child is now 12 and I still have the baby books that we bought for my oldest who is going to be 20 in a few months!!!!

Now it is time to decide what to do with all these books. Please remember to only donate books in good condition.

Sort the books into categories like baby and toddler, pre-school and primary/ high school.  Include old textbooks which, although not curriculum compliant, can be used as reference books by teachers and pupils. The same goes for University or college textbooks and finally adult fiction. Once this is done, it will be a lot easier to take them to the appropriate places like Crèches, nursery schools, orphanages, under privileged schools, places of shelter and charity shops.

Getting rid of the books

There is a list on the website and in the file section of my Facebook page “we’re getting sorted” titled ‘Charities to support’ where you will find the name and contact number of each place. Some will collect from you, or you will need to drop the books off. I also take a lot of mine to a second hand store at Stoneridge Mall in Greenstone JHB, called Books Galore.  The owner of the store will take your old ones and you can swap them for a few new ones, or buy a couple at a discount price.  She will also take and pass on books that you want to donate to various charities, as long as there are not too many for her to handle.

If you have a charity not on the list that you feel would benefit, please drop me an email, comment on this post or comment on Facebook, with the name of the charity and a contact number so that I can add it to the list.