Book clubs…
Posted by bbc on 20 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: musings
More stories from the clutter and clearing wars. Stuck in the back of one of these boxes was an envelope of receipts for book club purchases. I belonged to book clubs long before we had such a thing as Amazon. We lived in a small town that didn’t have a bookstore – there were paperback racks at the local drugstore and some selections of children’s books at the variety store but that was about it. So we always belonged to one or more of the various clubs that sent out books in the mail – and sent them automatically if you didn’t pay attention and return the card saying you didn’t want a particular month’s selection.
When I went away to college, I discovered the joys of bookstores. But I still liked getting things in the mail, so I kept the book club books as well. Sometimes, of course, I decided I needed something that really I would have been just as well off without. For instance, these receipts I just found are for two series of books, one on cooking and one on sewing, that I subscribed to. And I still have some of the volumes – very lightly used.
I did have reasons for both series – sewing because I did quite a bit of that and the tips and tricks in those books seemed useful. Of course, I’m not really using them any more because they’ve been packed up and I’ve not been doing any sewing to speak of. The cooking series was much less realistic – it was more something I thought I should know more about. I was once married to a man whose whole family was obsessed with cooking. I should have realized it wouldn’t end well when they wanted to talk about my favorite things to cook the first time I met them.
A good friend keeps encouraging me to cook but it’s obviously not my talent. She also advised me against getting rid of the books when I tried to give some of them to her several years ago. So most of them have gone as donations to library book sales. I did keep a few (under the delusion that I might still use them) but they’re safely stacked in their boxes. So they’re next on the donation list.
When I saw the receipts, I realized that these books were only about $8 each when I bought them. Granted, that’s about $35 or $40 today. But I’ve been housing them and moving them over the years, not to mention trying to figure out whether to keep them or not. All of that adds up to a continuing cost that just isn’t worth it. Maybe I’ll need one of them as soon as it’s gone, but I imagine I’ll survive without it.
My desk was behind this column.