Time For a Cull?

At the weekend I spent some time boxing up about half of my RPG collection. The shelves on which it had been stored have finally given up the ghost and are beyond the possibility of repair. This isn't a huge shock - take some cheap shelves from Argos, assemble badly, massively overload, and then leave for years and you're not going to have a good result!

Boxing all of these up really brought home just how much stuff I had accumulated, and really suggested that I should be having a cull of these books. This is tricky - the collection represents an accumulation of books acquired over 28 years (less a few things that were passed down to ARG, a few things that are somewhere in my parents' loft, and a few things that have just been lost). On the other hand, the reality is that not only will I never use "Relics & Rituals" again, but in fact I've never actually made real use of that book, or many others. And I can hardly claim to have some deep, abiding emotional tie to that book, or again to many of the others... though I do to the collection as a whole.

And on the other other hand, there's the issue of waste. For most of these books there really isn't any resale value, and indeed it would be more hassle than it's worth to deal with them on eBay. In many cases, the best destination for the books is recycling. As I say, it's a waste.

(Worst of all, this represents the opening of a floodgate. In addition to the RPG library, we also have a massive library of novels we'll never read again, and most of which weren't very good the first time out, a huge stack of DVDs that should be reduced, and so on. Basically, we just have too much stuff. But that discussion takes us into the territory of the other blog.)

One thing that does seem certain, though, is that some of these books won't be coming back out of the storage boxes even if they are kept. Any issues of Dragon magazine prior to #250 are included in the "Dragon Archive" PDF collection, and likewise any Pathfinder Adventure Path volumes are probably best accessed via PDF rather than having them take up room on shelves (unless and until I actually run them, at which point I would recover the physical copies). In some ways, it's unfortunate that I don't have PDF versions of everything... but, of course, if I did then that would just be yet another form of clutter, rather than a replacement...

The bottom line is that it's all just too horrible, and I'll clearly just have to keep them all!