Weeding is the official word for it, a little brutal sounding for what it actually is, which is going through the stacks and pulling anything that hasn’t circulated in ten or more years to make room for what actually gets used. It’s not my favorite part of the job, exactly, there’s something a little sad about a cart of books that nobody in a decade thought was worth the ten minutes it takes to walk over and check one out. But it’s necessary, shelf space is finite, and somebody has to make the call.

I always take a few home before they go to the library book sale, which technically I’m allowed to do, staff get first pick same as anyone, though I think I’m the only one who consistently does it. Last semester it was a water-damaged copy of a philosophy of science book from the eighties, spine barely holding, that I’m fairly sure I’m the first person to actually read cover to cover since it was acquired. The semester before that, a slim story collection translated from Polish that had exactly one checkout stamp on the card glued inside, from nineteen ninety four.

There’s a specific kind of curiosity that comes from picking a book because nobody wanted it rather than because someone recommended it, which is close to the opposite of how I choose almost everything else I read. No algorithm suggested it. No friend pressed it into my hands. It just sat there for a decade, quietly not being checked out, until I happened to be the one pulling the cart that week. That randomness produces some genuinely bad reads, books that deserved their decade of neglect. It’s also produced two or three of the more memorable things I’ve read in the last few years, exactly because I went in with zero expectations built up by anyone else’s opinion.

Marcus thinks this whole habit is a little morbid, taking home the books nobody wanted like I’m running some kind of literary hospice. Maybe there’s something to that, honestly. I don’t disagree with the framing so much as I don’t mind it. Somebody spent real time writing these, and the fact that the return on that time turned out to be one water-damaged copy and a single checkout stamp from thirty years ago doesn’t erase the book itself. It just means almost nobody knows it exists anymore. I like being one of the few who does.

I keep them on a separate little shelf at home, apart from everything else, not alphabetized by anything in particular, which for me is its own small statement. Everything else in the apartment has a system. These get to just sit there, rescued and unsorted, until I decide what to do with them next.