So here’s the problem: I’ve got 20 boxes of technical books in my office, and the bookshelves are already full. What should I do? Throw them all out? Stack the boxes against the wall, and hope that I’ll get used to the eyesore as time passes?

How, you might ask, did this situation come to be? Easy: we had a second home in Taos, New Mexico, where I had my office, my computer equipment, and my library of technical books. After 9-11, it became increasingly difficult for my family to travel from New York City to Taos, and nobody (except me) was interested in being there on a full-time basis. So we eventually sold the house, and our household possessions have been sitting in a New Jersey warehouse for the past four years while we tried to decide where and how we were going to live. Reality and common sense finally prevailed: it’s hard enough to keep one home organized, let alone two. So a few days ago, a moving company packed up our warehouse belongings and delivered them to our relatively compact, and quite fully occupied, NYC apartment.

My wife is dealing with the duplicate sets of living room furniture and kitchen appliances, and we’re both trying to figure out what to do with old chess trophies, baseball gloves, and other paraphernalia; but the boxes of technical books were obviously my responsibility. Some of them date back to the 1980s, and a few of my own books (i.e., the ones I’ve written myself) date back to the 1970s; but most are from the 1990s or early part of this decade.

It makes me wonder why I kept all these books in the first place. Perhaps it was because I remembered once hearing that you could tell what kind of person someone was by looking at the books on his bookshelf. So maybe I wanted people to look at my bookshelf and say, ooh, ahhh, what a Renaissance Man that Yourdon guy must be! But I’ve had no guests here in the office-at-home for the past 20 years who had the slightest interest in my bookshelf, or who would have cared about or understood the collection that I had assembled. So I finally had to admit, as those 20 boxes of unopened boxes continued to occupy every square foot of my office, that I should only keep the books if they served my needs.

And what’s the point in keeping all these books, when I can buy used copies from Amazon for a modest amount? For example, sitting atop one pile of books at the moment is Peter Senge’s excellent 1994 book, The Fifth Discipline; Amazon says that it has 141 new and used copies available, starting at prices as low as $3.34. Similarly, Amazon has 81 new and used copies of Steve McConnell’s 1993 tome, Code Complete, available for prices as low as $2.06. So why should I keep my own copy?

As it happens, these two books are relatively timeless; they’re just as relevant today as they were when they were first published over a decade ago. But I’ve got lots of others that are completely obsolete; I can’t imagine why I even bothered packing a copy of the Windows 98 user manual when I was emptying out the Taos house. And some of them are foreign editions of my old books; who (other than an utter narcissist like the original author) would ever want to see the Polish edition of my 1972 Design of On-Line Computer Systems, or the Portugese edition of my 1988 Modern Structured Analysis? It was amazing how much room I was able to reclaim when I finally admitted that it was only my ego that kept those editions from being ditched long, long ago.

But that was the easy part; that helped to eliminate perhaps 5-10 boxes of books. The rest of them are either timeless, or current and timely; so how does one decide which ones to keep, and which ones to toss? Well, I noticed that some of them were books that I’ve held onto for five or ten years, but never read. I meant to read them when I first bought them, and even today, I still wish I had enough free time to read them … but if they’ve been gathering dust for a decade, it’s time to admit that they deserve a more attentive owner.

And many of the books are ones that I admired when I first read them, and/or books whose author I know personally, and/or books that I found useful in my day-to-day work for some period of time after I first bought and read them. But while they provided tremendous advice and assistance for types of work I was doing at the time, I’m just not doing the kind of technical work today that I was doing 10-15 years ago. For example, I don’t code for a living any more; and so I really don’t need the C++, Visual Basic, and Java books that were once so important. And if, by some quirk of fate, I ever did find myself writing Java code 8 hours a day, I could re-purchase the same book from Amazon, with the same frayed edges, for two or three dollars.

So the main criterion for keeping a book on my bookshelf is the determination that I’m likely to read it again, cover to cover, within the next one or two years. I don’t know how realistic I’ve been in applying that criterion, but it has worked reasonably well: I’m now down to two remaining boxes of books, and I can see some additional candidates for disposal. In another week or so, I should have a relatively clean office once again, and I’ll have a much more useful, up-to-date selection of books on my shelves.

Meanwhile, what to do with all the books I’ve decided to eliminate? Well, I could sell them to Amazon; obviously, someone must be doing that, or there wouldn’t be any inventory of $2 used books out there. But I don’t have the patience to sell my used books to Amazon, eBay, or CraigsList; I’ll leave that to the younger generation. Similarly, I’ve given up on the idea of donating them to the local library; those librarians have no idea what to do with technical books, and I doubt whether a technical person would ever come looking for relevant technical books in a New York City public library these days.

Instead, my disposable technical books — along with some business books, management books, and various other castoffs — are going to a homeless guy down on the corner of my block, who sets up a table of used books each day. He’s got an amazing selection of both fiction and non-fiction, presumably collected from donors like me; and he sells them for prices ranging from one to five dollars. I don’t know if he has any idea what I’m giving him, but I’ve become his best buddy; when I arrive each morning with another bag of books for him, he beams from ear to ear and hollers,”The bookmeister!How ya doin’, my man?”