Book sale

As part of our attempt to reduce the amount of stuff in our lives, Saori and I hosted a book fire sale at the happy hour of the architecture school last friday. Those of you who know me know I have several hundred books, so I've been trying to cut some of them down. We went in, priced the books low, and waited for the crowds. We actually did better far than I thought- selling at least half of the books we brought with us. Saori made about $80, and I cleared at least $100. Actually, most of the books Saori sold were formerly my books that she pulled out of my Goodwill pile from a year ago.

One of our bookish professors who has actually published a few books on architecture pulled me aside and as half-jokingly asked how I could sell my architecture books. I replied that these were just the ones I didn't feel I really needed or had already read. He was unconvinced- "some of these books don't get reprinted," he reminded me. If I kept all the books I'd ever received or bought, I'd have literally a wall of books by now, probably about a thousand volumes.

It's really not a matter of how many books you have anyway, its how many you read, how many you reference. If I don't re-read the Annals of Archaic Architecture: Andean A-frame Apartments, it might as well be on someone's else shelf than my own. If I never crack open LeCorbusier's Lesser Known Poetry it might as well be in more interested hands. Just because this is my blog, here are more books which didn't make the cut to stay on my shelves:

• Nanotechnology Flooring of the Future
• Vaguely Spanish Mission Style Strip Malls
• Hand Drafting
• Green Detail: Sustainable Bathroom Partitions
• Theories and Manifestos of Architects Before Employment
• Aliens: a Revisionist History of Architecture
• Theodore R. Q. Spalling- The Father of Mall Photo-studio Design
• Modern Marvels: the Indestructible Tacoma Narrows Bridge
• The Phaeton Expensive Book of Expensive Houses
• Interinterstices: The spaces between a space and the space between that space and another space
• Mind-Blisteringly Expensive Materials for Facades
• The Coffee Table-Sized Coffee-Table Book of Coffee Tables
• Sustainable Design: Growies on Walls, Yay!
• Architecture Now! Detroit
• Modern Bidet Standards
• 152,752 Amazing Projects That Will Never Be Built
• We Just Scanned Every Piece of Paper in the Office including Chinese Takeout Menus and LL Bean Catalogs to Make a Thick Book With no Organization or Narrative with an Introduction by Bruce Mau
• Plumbing Masters of the 21st Century
• Fundamentals of Subway Restaurants Construction
• Oversimplified Mechanics for Dummies
• Mashed Potatoes and a Spoon- the Design Secrets of Zaha Hadid
• How Architecture will Save The World
• The Architect's Guide to Retirement