This is the problem with being nerds into anything literary.  

The comic book single issue collection isn’t too bad, just two long boxes, and a couple of short boxes, some stray issues kicking around.  

We do have a couple shelves of graphic novels.  

But just straight up fiction?  

Oh man…  I can’t even blame it all on sci fi conventions.  We both had a ton of books before we started going to conventions.  I mean, those certainly didn’t help, what with helping me flesh out my Tanith Lee and Manly Wade Wellman collections.  

I keep promising myself that I’m going to cull some things.  I am.  More than ten.  I promise.  But man, I just like books.  

Part of me says that I should really sit down, make a spreadsheet and figure out which ones I can replace with digital copies, and keep the ones I can’t, or the ones that are signed.  

Buuuut…  

Having already lost one round of music purchases when the online platform I purchased them through shut down, I am hesitant.  

It’s why the national archives don’t use digital media for storage, they use microfiche.  Because if all technology dies, you know what you can read with a magnifying glass? Microfiche.  

You know what you can’t read with a magnifying glass?  CDs, DVDs, pdfs, or any electronic format.  

You need a functioning computer.  And given how many computers I’ve owned since my original copy of Blood Bowl was playable, I get it. My new computer doesn’t have any sort of external media drive.  The assumption being you’ll store everything on the cloud, or can access it via the cloud or something.  But what if you can’t?

Let’s be clear… In the US, our infrastructure sucks.  It’s in terrible shape.  

Out of date poorly maintained equipment in the electrical grid of California started 1500 wildfires in the past decade, one of which was the Dixie fire, that killed four people and was one of the biggest on record.  

An ice storm in Texas wiped out their grid last year.  For nearly the entire state.

I have yet to live anywhere in Seattle that doesn’t lose power on the regular.  The last place we lived lost power over a dozen times in one month because squirrels. 

Squirrels. 

I am a little freaked out that more people aren’t freaked out by the state of the power grid(s) in this country, to be honest.  

Also, Amazon is behaving less than ethically, and I think we’re going to be divorcing them for the foreseeable future.  I’ve spent most of this past year weaning us off our dependence on them for convenient  purchases, particularly impulse purchases.  

Now that we’re all vaccinated, we’re enjoying going out and actually shopping. Masked, and with copious supplies of hand sanitizer. 

But books… yes, we still have a lot of them.

Yeah, I’m working on it.  I mean, even if I never bought another book, I would never run out of reading material.  

The authors/series that will not be culled no matter what:
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Manly Wade Wellman
Glen Cook
Tanith Lee
Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe)
Lillian Jackson Braun (The Cat Who books)
Jane Yolen
Roger Zelazny (Amber, among other things)
L. Frank Baum (Oz)
Steven Brust
Steven Erikson (Malazan)

Those are the authors of whom I have collected everything they’ve published or nearly everything.  Or at least everything in the fiction worlds I really enjoy. But mostly everything.   Ok, I need to get back to packing.  I took next week off to work on fiction, but instead I’m packing.  It is what it is.