Bibliophile Spring Cleaning

We’re on a cleaning jag at the house. It’s beyond the normal "throw out the clothes that no longer fit – kill the dust bunnies" cleaning, but more that deep kind of clean that makes you reflect on your soul and inner worth.

It’s the kind of cleaning that acknowledges that 34 waist jeans are a thing of the past, and they will never be important to us again.  They can go to Goodwill without reservation.

It's the kind of cleaning that recognizes that we really don’t need to keep both the photographs and the negatives of the pictures snapped when one of us worked the Lion’s Club Chicken Dinner Day in the 8th Grade, especially since we can’t identify 99.9% of the people in the pictures.  Some things should have been shredded long ago and memories of those haircuts should be obliterated through hypnosis if necessary.

It's the kind of cleaning that realizes that we will never, ever, be able to finish all the craft projects for which we have materials, even if we worked on them every night for the next 100 years.

Especially those that are in boxes that moved from another state and have yet to be opened and inspected.

One of the things this makes very obvious is, like the craft projects, we couldn’t read all the books in the house if we took vows of silence, disconnected the internet and cable and never mowed the yard again, devoting ourselves to sequentially emptying the boxes and bookshelves while doing nothing but reading for the rest of our natural lives.

That's one of the places that we decided to start in earnest, and the result is that we now have a variety of boxes sitting around in most every room with books going into them.

The first thought was to sell them. After all, we know what we paid for them.

One of the sad realities with regard to books, especially textbooks, is that they depreciate faster than cottage cheese left on the kitchen counter in July. Despite the fact that some of those books that cost upwards of $100 in the early 80’s, they’re probably not worth a quarter at a garage sale now.

The problem with previously-read books, though, is that you keep remembering why you liked it and kept that book.  One of those was a book that a friend gave me when I opened my first office. Published in 1910, it was a manual on how to operate your law office.

Some things have changed, obviously, but some are worth revisiting for consideration again.

For example, there’s a whole chapter devoted to a discussion of whether or not you should have a telephone installed in your office.

Early in the chapter, the author rules the thought of actually having a phone on your desk as somewhat ludicrous. After all, nobody is going to go to the extravagance of actually having TWO telephones in the same suite of offices or home.  He opines that it needs to be on your secretary’s desk so she can answer it, and besides, there's really very little reason for anyone other than the secretary to use the telephone. If there’s truly anyone that the attorney needs to talk with who can’t come into the office, the boss can step out to the front office for a moment and take that call.

Think about that one.  How'd you like to have to trot out to the front office to take every phone call during the day?
The discussion talks about the fact that a telephone is really unnecessary since you can rely on the postal service’s twice a day delivery or couriers bringing notes to you from other offices.

I couldn't make stuff like this up. I'm not that smart.
After debating both sides of the telephone topic for several pages, the author ultimately determines that a telephone is unnecessary anywhere in the office. It interrupts your thought processes since there’s no telling when it will go off and rattle your nerves, it’s difficult to figure out how to bill with the jumble of things going on, it interrupts time better spent reading the law and interferes with the personal relationship with your client.

He is in favor of typewriters, though, since it makes your documents look neater. 

Of course, it's obvious that the writer was brilliant in his insight.  Unfortunately, like some of the best ideas of mankind, this one will be discarded, relegated to the box with all the other books full of knowledge that is no longer relevant or useful or practical. The value of most of the suggestions in that particular book are of little relevance in today's reality. It’s fun to dream of a world without telephones, though.

Now you see why it takes so long to sort through the books in the house.