In a story you may or may not have heard back in May, the owner of a used bookstore in Missouri staged a book burning, incinerating a portion of his stock as a protest against the decline of reading and the fact that people just aren't interested in buying books. At the time, I read a thread on another forum where you had a good number of people outraged by the notion that these books, many of them out of print or even antique, would be destroyed.
You also had those who said that people iconize the written word too much. People are loathe to destroy books simply by virtue of them being books and not because the books themselves are valuable. Even something such as the "bound report from the Fourth Pan-American Conference held in Buenos Aires in 1910" described in the article is probably more interesting in theory than in the actual practice of reading it.
I was thinking about this yesterday as Flea and I wandered around a large antique shop, filled with books of varying age and value. It also called to mind (I'm making a jump here) of another article talking about historic building preservation in Chicago. While it's hard enough to gain preservation for some ornate structure from the turn of the 19th/20th century, buildings from the 1940's and 1950's are being torn down because they are simply "old" and not antiques. As a result, architectural gems built in the Art Deco and Modern style are being destroyed with little in the ways of protection.
So, back to books, I was looking at things such as a "History of Modern Warfare" from the Vietnam through Gulf War 1 and thought "This book is pretty expendable. It's obsolete now and not old enough to have value as a curio." But, like the afore mentioned buildings, destroying it will guarantee that it never has value for its history. On the other hand, it's a shitty out-of-date book that no one with an interest in the topic would select to read over a more contemporary volume. On another shelf was a medical tome from the 1870's. While it had some amusement value for reading about what soothing liniments to apply to combat the croup, it didn't contain any medical information we don't know now. It probably didn't even contain new insights into life in the 1870's. Was it really valuable? Did its rarity make it more of a loss to destroy than the "Modern Warfare" book?
Typing this, I am a hypocrite. I have an old dictionary where the "list of presidents" ends with Johnson and the "new words for this edition" page contains "Laser" and "LSD". It's just a crappy, out of date dictionary but I hold on to it. I have old novels which could go into the bin without a loss to mankind. I still hate to do it. Maybe because, so long as the pages are there, the book is still 'useful' and it seems a shame to get rid of it.
How about you folks? Do you hold onto books long after they're "obsolete"? How do you get rid of them? Is there value in a book simply because it's a book? Should there be?
As a final note, one of my favorite bookstores, a used bookstore in a basement location, closed up. At least they went online rather than out of business but gone are the days of browsing for hidden and surprise treasures.