Lowering the Volumes : Discarding Books, Even Those Unread Oddities, Can Be a Troublesome Chore

AS OUR REMODELING project continues, and the time draws near when I will have to move out of my old study into my new one, I am trying to lighten ship. I have been weeding out my collection of 2,000 or 3,000 books.

It is very hard to discard a book, no matter how dull, esoteric or out-of-date it may be. I have, for example, several collections of trivia, which, by definition, is of little value. But who knows when I might need a bit of trivia.

One must beware of discarding books that have been autographed to oneself, personally, by their authors. Several times I have tossed a book, only to retrieve it, look inside and find that, yes, it was autographed. “To Jack Smith, with best wishes,” or something more sentimental.

I am planning to give the books to a local Friends of the Library group, for its book sale, and there is always a danger that someone will buy an autographed book and notify its author that it was picked up for 50 cents at a book sale.

I remember my chagrin a few years ago when a reader wrote to tell me that he had borrowed one of my books from a library and found that I had autographed it for Herb Caen, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist. I wondered how the book had traveled from Caen’s office to a local library and decided to phone him and ask. He said, “It must have been my ex-wife,” an explanation which I regarded as an obvious evasion.

The hardest thing is throwing out books one has loved. I decided to get rid of my entire collections of Robert Nathan, H. Allen Smith and Peter De Vries. Nathan was a friend of mine, and his novels were enchanting. Smith and De Vries were surely two of our funniest humorists.

One parts with humor reluctantly. But I have read all those books at least twice, and I feel that they will do more good if they are spread around, so that people who have never read them can discover them.

My Smith books--almost his entire output--are autographed by the man himself, but not to me. They were all autographed to his friend Fred Beck, who used to write a Farmers Market column for The Times. Beck called me one day and asked me to meet him on the Malibu pier. I did as he asked. It was a mystical experience. The pier was shrouded in fog. Beck and I had never met, but we recognized each other instantly. He asked me to pull my car up alongside his. We transferred the entire collection of autographed Smith books from his car to mine.

Like Beck, I have found that it’s time to pass Smith on. So farewell to “Life in a Putty Knife Factory,” “Low Man on the Totem Pole” and “Lost in the Horse Latitudes.” I hope someone else enjoys them as much as I did.

Though a dark streak underlies his work, as it does most humor, Peter De Vries is the funniest of modern novelists. I invite you to read “Comfort Me With Apples,” “The Tunnel of Love” or “The Mackerel Plaza.” It is with regret that I know I will never read them again.

Inevitably, I am discarding books in which I have no interest whatever. I don’t even know how I acquired them, and I can’t see why anyone else would buy them. But of course there’s no accounting for tastes.

One of these anomalies is “The Hog Book” (Doubleday) by William Hedgepeth. The title is not a joke. The book is about hogs. The history, myth and mystique of hogs. It is dedicated “to the millions of porkers who have gone to their final resting place inside us.”

After tossing it I retrieved it for another look. The chapters included “Hogs in Love,” “Swine in Art, Sport and Show Biz,” “Pig Poetry,” “Hoglore” and “Immanent Divinity.” There is nothing in this world that isn’t interesting.

I also have a book on bats, but I’m not giving that away. I am fascinated by bats, and I suspect that, like hogs, they are sadly misunderstood.

I am also tossing a few antiques. One of them is “In Pastures New,” by George Ade (published in 1906). Like me, Ade was a newspaper columnist, and, as I sometimes do, he tried to be funny. But, alas, I’m afraid his new pastures are old today. His first chapter is called “Getting Acquainted with the English Language”; he notes that American English and English English are two different languages. He recalls seeing a sign in a Paris shop that said, “English spoken--American understood.” Seems to me I’ve written about that subject many times--speaking about old pastures.

I’ve decided to keep “The Hog Book.” I’m sure there are things about hogs that I ought to know.