Andrew's 4 Rules for Keeping a Book (or, how I learned to stop being a book hoarder)

Anyone who has known me at any point in my life, probably knows I have a natural tendency towards hoarding.

I come by it naturally - it's something for which Blankenships have always been known.  When my grandparents died it took me months to clean out their attic.  I think they saved every pill bottle and medicine bottle they ever had. We had to buy extra trash cans just to dispose of it all.

I always thought it was because my grandparents had lived through the Great Depression but mu father had a history of the Blankenships with an anecdote about how in medieval England, a Blinkensop died (the English spelling of Blankenship) and his worldly possessions included various random bins of random useless material, meticulously sorted by type.

The book then went on to say, essentially, "Does that sound familiar?"

So Blankenships have always been hoarders, all the way back to the Dark Ages.  When I was a child my father brought home the vinyl library of rock albums the radio station where he had worked tossed out when they changed formats.  He built heavy wooden shelves to hold them and I grew up listening to Queen and the Beatles.  It gave me a knowledge of music that has served me well.

It was a good thing.

My freshman year of college an Appalachian Charity dropped a ballroom full of free books at the University of Kentucky and I picked up at least three boxes of books and packed them back to my dorm room. They were cut covered and stamped with "Not for Resale," but there were some interesting books.

They formed the core of my personal library, which I lugged around with me whenever I moved. At one point I had seven shelves worth of books, all alphabetized with the paperbacks stacked two deep and two high on the lower shelves.

My brother came by one day and said I had more books than I could ever read and asked me how many of them I had actually read. At the time it was two or three per shelf of between twenty and thirty books. In my shame, I reorganized my books. I kept my personal favorites on the top shelf of the first bookshelf and the rest in alphabetical order on the shelves underneath.

I kept all of the books on the shelf where they were, but when I finished a book, I would move it to the end of the shelf. So I would have the unread books in order followed by the books I had already read. I made a concerted effort to read through my collection and the next time my brother mentioned the books (a few years later) I was happy to report that the last time I checked, I was up to seven out of ten books and had finished some shelves completely.

By the time I started Journalism school (in 2003) I was reasonably well read, which is something I think all Journalists should be.

Then I started to Yard Sale.  It started when I found a bag of GI Joe parts at Goodwill one day and started to put them together to sell on eBay.  I could piece together a complete figure, match the accessories using the internet, and sell it for a large profit on eBay.

I discovered that I could buy toys as parts, figure out what they were, put them back together, and make money.  I spent so much time on toy web sites trying to identify parts that I had the idea to create my own web site, whereon I could post photographs of the toys, create an index of parts and accessories, then sell them.

That's where 3&3quarter.com came from.  It was an excuse for me to buy more toys.

And to hoard toys.

The business plan meant that I would have to stockpile parts of a toy until I found enough parts to finish it.  My house was covered with bins and baseball card boxes full of toy parts.

It was shameful.

But while I was out at the crack of dawn every Saturday looking for toys, I would happen across books as well. If a book looked interesting and was cheap, I would buy it.  Before I knew what had happened, I had too many books.

I had four or five copies of some books.  Books stacked to ceiling.  Books crammed into shelves.  Books holding up boards with other books on top of them.  It was out of control.

We had to start paring down.  Basically we spent two weeks hauling toy parts and books to various donation bins around Lexington.

By the time we finished the purge I had developed four rules to determine whether I should keep a book.

1) It's a book I haven't read yet, but am likely to read

A book should be read.  That is a book's intended purpose.  A book sitting on a shelf, unread is the saddest thing in the world.

2) It's a book I've already read, but it was good enough that I want to read it again

I do on occasion like a book well enough to read it twice.  Still Life With Woodpecker, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Prince Caspian are all books I've read multiple times.

3) It's a book I've already read, but it was good enough that I want to share it

This in my opinion is the only reason to ever have multiple copies of the same book at one time.  My wife and I gave out at least eight copies of Harry Potter books to various people through the years.

4) The book invokes genuine sentiment

The book in question conjures a specific memory. Either it was a well thought out gift, or it reminds you of the time you met the author.

One of my favorite books ever was a copy of Fatherhood by Bill Cosby that my parents gave me when Christian was born. They included a letter about what it would mean now that I was a father.

When I tossed out three garbage bags worth of comic books as a teenager, I kept three.  Two that had been Christmas presents from my mother (because I knew she went out of her way to find them for me) and an Uncanny X-Men Annual that my brother, John, bought off one of his friends at school because he knew it was the last issue I needed to finish my Atlantis Attacks set.  Every time I looked at it, it made me smile.

Which is why I kept it.

The Return of...?

I had a fight with my wife, Robin, today.

She feels taken for granted and used, like I'm not pulling my own weight.

She's right.

I can and should be working harder. As a journalist and a writer, I can work from the house. It never worked out before, because I'm easily distracted and distractable. I wanted a job outside of the house so I could spark my creativity, but mainly because I was scared.

I am scared.

I haven't written anything substantial in over two years, and that was a blog post about a flyer I found outside of Kroger. It actually got picked up by Fark.com and that was a professional high point for me as a writer.

Then I had the stroke. It took me months of therapy before I could read or write. My confidence was shattered.

I started on a book called Pants With No Pockets. It was to be a stroke memoir. I started this blog as a sideways way to eventually get a book deal. This blog was supposed to become that book. It might still become that book, but not any time soon.

Then I had the idea to do a blog about the background music in cartoons. Every time I hear a piece of music I look it up on wikipedia and track it down to its original piece. The problem is, my computer I write at doesn't have a sound card and the computer with sound has a bad keyboard. I can't write the blog without two computers and now that my 13-year-old son plays computer games, it's hard to get access to any one computer, let alone both at once.

But anyway, I'm going to try to write more, and sell some stories of some sort. I realize by not writing when writing is my only marketable skill that I have left, I'm actually being a burden to my wife and my family, which is the one thing I never want to be.

So, in conclusion, I am going to write like my life and wife depend on it. Because they do.