Hoarders

"Homer & Langley," E.L. Doctorow's latest novel, is a fictional re-telling of the story of the Collyer brothers, the famous reclusive packrats of New York City. This is not the first novel about the Collyers; the story of the compulsive hoarding that led to their deaths in 1947 has been told many times, and police and firefighters still refer to junk-filled homes as Collyer situations.

Collyer situations are apparently not so uncommon. A&E Television has found enough of them to produce a reality show called "Hoarders," which is now in its second season and is creating quite a buzz.

Clearly we are fascinated by material culture gone wrong. Perhaps we are also a bit frightened by it, imagining the cold light of day and strangers' eyes on the hidden areas of our own homes.

Happily, the new year and the time for resolutions is at hand. This year we're really going to do it: We're going to get organized, clean this place up and rid our home of clutter.

Booksellers and librarians can help. In my library, where we embrace the system devised by that most orderly of men, Melvil Dewey, books on "de-cluttering" will be found in two places. Dewey had a fine feel for the nuances and realized that, in terms of "getting organized," some people may just need a little help with the housekeeping (648.5) while others may, in fact, need personal transformation (646.7).

The Housekeeping section is dominated by the self-proclaimed king of clutter removal, Don Aslett. Aslett, the owner of a professional cleaning service, began writing books about conquering clutter in the 1980s and is still at it. He takes a hard-nosed approach to the problem: Do you love it? Does it love you back? Smack! These are material possessions we're talking about here – inanimate objects. Let's get to work.

Simplicity is the theme in the personal transformation section. Simplifying was an extremely popular topic in the late 1990s and is generating interest once again. These books are more about lifestyle changes than cleaning, but the bottom line remains the same: all this stuff just has to go.

Publishing in this area now is coming from professional organizers and lifestyle coaches. Unlike Aslett, they want to explore the reasons behind your clutter. Why are you accumulating these things? How do these things make you feel? Clutter has a more expansive definition and may include activities and even people. While it seems a somewhat softer approach, it's not. In Brooks Palmer's "Clutter Busting: Letting Go of What's Holding You Back," for example, the client almost always ends up weeping. And then the stuff goes. They do feel better afterward.

So what about books? Are books clutter? (Perhaps more to the point: are your books clutter?) Aslett, predictably, says yes. We are caught up in some medieval notion that books are rare and precious objects, and they are not. Many books deserve to be burned and as for the rest, they are cheaply produced and readily available. There should be no more than a very few well-loved and carefully chosen books in your home. Use the library.

The simplification people are less harsh but they too favor the communal ownership (and off-site storage) offered by libraries. Books undeniably take up space; they interfere with downsizing. And, of course, the most current authors are starting to invoke the "K" word (Amazon.com's Kindle) as the optimum solution to the problem of book storage.

But what about those of us who like to have books – real books – around us? Who like to have books in the home? I polled my colleagues and found a 50/50 split. About half of them rely almost entirely on the library for their books and have very few that reside permanently in their homes. The other half, though fully supportive of the role of libraries, embrace personal ownership of books as well.

So how do we keep those collections under control? Palmer wonders why you are collecting books in the first place and how they make you feel. If they don't make you feel nervous or inadequate, he doesn't offer much guidance. The one-in-one-out rule works for sweaters, but seems a bit too arbitrary for books. The "will I ever re-read this?" question was suggested as a guideline by several; unfortunately, we all seem to be planning on a lot of re-reading.

Most of the guidelines used by libraries don't seem to apply at home. Most of our books aren't so heavily used that they're falling apart. Our personal collections don't have to be balanced or up-to-date or even accurate. The only library rule that would seem to apply is the I-just-like-it rule of retention, first put forth by the famous Midwestern librarian Linda Larson. I just like it. I think I'll keep it.

Regardless of their approach, all of the authors I consulted agreed that de-cluttering is very hard work. It is very important to stay hydrated and to take frequent breaks. Make a cup of tea, sit down, relax. Now would be a good time to read another chapter of Nicholas Basbanes' "A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books."

(Photograph from striatic, Creative Commons, Flickr.com)