I once fancied myself a book collector, and I do have a few books of good value; you know the kind of thing, The Hawk in the Rain by Ted Hughes (Harper and Brothers, 1956), and once I thought I had a lot of interesting books, several bookcases full, though nothing all in one room that the word library suggests. Gradually, over time, I was also collecting bookcases, and bookends. Books took up the walls in most rooms. The hallway was tight. A certain scent of paper met me when I came home – not all the books were acid-free.

And then I had to move. To a smaller place. I had no alternative but to purge. For a while I was a little crazed because I had to change into someone who was no longer a collector but a purger. I hadn’t expected the upheaval; I’d had my nose in a book.

I had to have a plan because time was tight, the end of the month wasn’t going to arrive any slower just because I wanted it to.

How to decide? A wise friend told me to keep the poetry, that they were the tools of my trade, and I did, all those slim volumes, some oddly shaped, others frail from the 60s. I kept anything signed, almost all travel and history. I kept what I thought of as “special,” a category so broad it threatened to wreck the system. Many hardcover novels departed, except some first editions I liked. I found myself more ruthless than I imagined possible. If the book was likely still in the local library, I ditched it. In the last days my judgment was skewed, rushed, at least as seen from the point of view of the first book taken down and boxed, back when I was in sentimental fond farewell mode, giving each book its due.

I sent 35 liquor-store boxes out the door. A friend hauled many away in his overloaded Volkswagen. A bunch went to a book sale for a literary magazine. A fine first edition hardcover of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz was foisted onto a friend who happened by and was glad to bear it away. Another friend took Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. I left as many books as I could at those birdhouse-shaped community libraries: give one, take one. It was all give.

I settled in. And then I moved a second time! (Has anyone read a recent novel about a lunatic landlady?) I took bags to the used bookstore, friends took some away. I was gaining skills: this time I was even more selective. But the poetry came with me wholesale still.

It dawned on me that, anyway, I was really more of a reader than a collector. I like books, sure, the pure compact heft of them, their ink and promise. But it’s reading that holds me to them, to their words and worlds. I keep those I feel I must, and I welcome any that come my way, because my friends know that I read, and so they pass books on to me, to do with what I will, read or keep or pass further along. And I’ve learned to enjoy how they flow in and out of my hands, as well as the hands of others.