A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

I used to work in a library, and this was often the case. Our basement was stuffed to the gills with romance novels that nobody was reading anymore, mysteries published decades ago, and kids books that probably related to kids from a previous generation more. A yearly sale would see the collection trimmed. Almost across the board, you could still get those books through interlibrary loan. If not from the county network, from another library in the state. In my time, I never heard of anyone missing a book that had been disposed of.

People see some value in the physical books themselves. They are sacred, discarding them becomes a crime against knowledge. Sure I get it, the nazis burned books; but these libraries are in no way comparable to that

Decades ago there were rows and rows of bookshelves, with these bound magazines, going back to the 1880's. It was so interesting to look through them.

But now there was nothing, zippo, left of that. Just huge areas with completely empty shelves. Apparently it happened fairly recently, and the bookshelves hadn't been removed yet.

I asked the reference librarian where you could look through these, online. But she came up empty, unless you're actually a student and have access to their special subscriptions that may have these old magazines.

Despite the frenzy of building at most American universities, the library is forced to serve dual purpose as space for study and collaboration as well as repository of printed material. The collection is not managed on merely its own merits, but subordinated to the other, competing demands even on its 'home' turf.

Here's another article about the same library, the Chester Fritz Library, acquiring one of the 11 remaining copies of a 444-year-old book: https://blogs.und.edu/und-today/2026/02/chester-fritz-librar...

1) the space is needed for other purposes (even though funding for said purpose might not be secured) 2) having shelves of useless junk makes discovering useful good stuff much harder 3) the university library has a mandate to support the curriculum of courses being taught, not being a repository of all human writing

Yes interlibrary loan UX sucks (although at my library I made it quite good!) and yes interlibrary loan needs to be pushed much harder.

My particular experience with book dumpster diving was when they were cleaning out the office of a former professor at my college, who had been a student of Dijkstra, and had nine binders with photocopies of the EWD archive [1]. I and two other students split up the books, and to this day I have three volumes of faded yellow copies of these papers. Despite the fact that these are all digitized now in some form it's still a chunk of history that I feel privileged to own.

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/

OTOH - I personally don't have enough room for real books, so everything I have is digital on a NAS. It's there, but "not the same".

Digitization reminds me of part of the plot of "Rainbow's End" (Vinge), where physical books get digitized, through a destructive process...

I’ve fantasized (like other datahoarders) of personal archives - and I do have a few hundreds of gigabytes of textual content archived for myself and to LORA my machines into. Copyright law does make it hard to have a co-op of book scanners but I can scan all of mine for myself.

Perhaps the future will be universal access but in the event it is not, perhaps my children will benefit from the family archive - though a future Primer must necessarily sort out the vast quantities of it that are inexplicably fan fiction erotica.

> When Wharton died in 1937, without any children, her will bequeathed her library to the sons of two friends of hers. The first, William Royall Tyler, Jr., stored his half in a warehouse on the outskirts of London. The other half went to Colin Clark, who let the books molder for decades at his family castle in Kent until financial troubles prompted his brother to begin selling off chunks of it to various dealers in rare books. Clark’s half was painstakingly recovered and brought back to the Mount, but the other half was destroyed in 1941, during the London Blitz.

Man plans, and God laughs, as they say.

The second event refers to what happened to the librarians who had been responsible for this decision, when the full effects of it became evident.

- A legendarium of the Confusion Era, by Franklin Duane, 192 PCE Edition

No library will ever just throw books out randomly. Most works are available from many dozen of other libraries and not even close to lost if thrown out. Inter library loan insures that they can always be gotten should a user need them. Shelve space is not infinite, and books not being used out blocks space for works that are in use.

Tools like worldcat and familiarity with the fields the library's collection cover, helps avoid weeding rare and unique works. Librarians are well aware of their library's forte. A single library isn't the world repository of knowledge. The network of collaboration between all national and academic libraries is.

This doesn't happen everywhere. I have an old friend who like me is a fan of Michigan history. Every time he bought a book on his rural county or its towns he'd give a copy to his local library. Twenty years in he found out they were just selling them to brokers for ten to twenty percent of the cover price. Now he gives the list price of the book to the library with the understanding they use it for books of history.

https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/visit/nrlf

As an academic, the vast majority of my reading is on my Kobo, and I don’t think this particular medium encourages this. Sure, an e-reader is inferior to print books in terms of random access and keeping multiple pages open at once, but I don’t find myself skimming the way I might on a laptop screen or smartphone.

Maybe publishers could have the right to purchase the books back at current list price or something if they want to block the shredding.

* https://i.abcnewsfe.com/a/d4018abd-6789-46ea-83bc-092fddc313...

* https://abcnews.com/US/books-dumped-en-masse-floridas-new-co...

Gotta love how as hundreds of billions of tax dollars are being misappropriated through corruption, state university books about to be trashed can't be taken home supposedly to prevent corruption. Nothing wrong with throwing away books, but let common sense prevail and people take them home.

Down with the oligarchy.

I can't give them away.

It's enough for hundreds of "Little Free Libraries" and suppose that I built the enclosures in my shop, nobody would put up a base.

I would love to see some young person or immigrant learn some useful skills. Prison libraries wouldn't take them, unless I DELIVER them to their doorstep (or gate, I suppose). Nobody cares. That's the state our society is in now.

I am reminded of a PhD I worked with who wanted the world on a platter, but DELIVERED to him. I find this syndrome among a lot of people.

1. I want it ALL

2. I want it FREE

3. I want it NOW, and

4. I want it DELIVERED on a SILVER PLATTER.

People are just comatose. They talk about doing good, and leave it at the "listen to me" stage. I am reminded of a story by the Venerable Sangharakshita.

> From Lecture 095 "The Universal Perspective of Mahayana Buddhism" by Sangharakshita:

> Let's suppose that there is a great famine somewhere - the sort of terrible famine that you still get even now sometimes in India. There's no food. Everybody is starving. Everybody is gaunt, famished, skeleton-like. And there's terrible suffering. Now in a certain town in the country where this famine has occurred there happen to be two men who have an enormous quantity of grain, quite enough to feed all of the people. One of the men is old, the other is young. Now, what does the old man do? He puts up a notice outside his front door. And the notice reads: 'Whoever comes will be given food.'

> Now what about the young man - what does he do? The young man takes a great sack of grain on his back, and he goes from door to door distributing the grain, and when one sack becomes empty, he rushes back home and gets another one. And in this way distributes a great deal of grain all over the town. He gives the grain away to whoever asks. And he's so keen on getting the grain to the people that he doesn't mind going into the poorest and the dirtiest and the darkest of hovels. He doesn't even mind going into places where respectable people don't usually venture. Because there's only one idea in his mind, and the idea is that everybody must be fed, nobody should be allowed to starve.

Not one book should go to the landfill, and I have seen the local library do it, if there is a single person who wants to read and can't afford books.

Reminder to everyone. Get off your overused asses and share a little of your "too much and never enough" with others, with emphasis on getting separating fanny from couch.

I'll just keep trying.

WHY DO I LOVE BOOKS?

My Dad used to read books to my brother and me. I learned to read from those books. I gave them to my young daughter. In 1999, I lost both parents, and while I was paying my last respects to Mom, my wife (now ex-wife) asked my daughter if she was reading those "old" books (First editions, mostly, by Thornton Burgess, of "Mother West Wind" fame.) My daughter, being very young, said no, so off they all went to the Goodwill, behind my back, not thinking at all that a young kid had absolutely no way of buying such books, and NOT asking if her Dad gave them to her. But Tiger Moms are like that. That was around Christmas time. Come Eastertime, I wondered where the books went, and found out. Family heirlooms gone.

In a form of compensation, I did manage to buy similar, if not identical, books at Moe's Bookstore over time, just so there wouldn't be this big hole in my life. They're on my shelves now. It's my daughter's choice whether to have kids, but at least I closed that loop.

Just because you don't value something doesn't mean that it has no value to someone else. Some people think that the world revolves around them, and don't consider what anyone else thinks, wants, needs or values.

I will find a way.

>Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries. --- Anne Herbert

When I was very young, my father retired to a rural county in Virginia where the county library was a carrel of used paperbacks in the basement library --- for each Scholastic book order, the teacher would remove a couple of books (as well as the promotional poster which my purchases made eligible), then hand me the box and the balance of its contents.

Like the furrow's length which I grew to feel in my bones by helping a neighbor plow his garden w/ a horse, I feel that quote in my soul.

>A home without books is a body without soul. (or words to that effect) --- Marcus Tullius Cicero/G.K. Chesterton

c.f.,

>No ornament of a house can compare with books; they are constant company in a room, even when you are not reading them. --- Harriet Beecher Stowe