I just wrote what was supposed to be a couple of paragraphs of reaction to siderea's post about Marie Kondo and books, which turned into multiple pages of feelsdump about tidying and really the only parts that need to see the light of day are

Derry Girls is fine, I guess, but if you've watched one of the Sister Michael compilation vids you're probably good stopping there

and

(A story about a large donations-sorting center that has some kind of magical heatsink/storage battery for all the bad vibes from the spirits of trashed once-beloved objects is something I would like to read, please. Anyone who thinks Westerners don’t understand animism of made objects has never helped sort junk donations on a large scale and seen what people couldn’t bear to throw away. We’re just deeply uncomfortable with it because most of us don’t have a good framework to understand it in. Can we call the story "The Joy Equations"? Can we power an FTL drive with the accumulated spiritual sadness of the debris of the Age of Excess?)

Anyway, what it was meant to be an intro to: I have finally finished all of the small tasks I could pretend were "preparation" and have to face the next piece of my ongoing tidying project: fit ~400 unshelved nonfiction books onto ~6 available feet of linear shelf space.

Okay yes that seems comically impossible on the face of it, but I think I can squeeze a fair amount of more space by accepting that all the rest of the nonfiction will just have to be shelve for maximum space use instead of attractiveness of shelves, and also weed about 10%-15% of the collection as I go.

It's the weeding that's going to be hard. Most of these books have already survived multiple weeds, and I don't buy any new ones unless:

1. they make me happy.
2. I could not easily get another copy if I needed one on short notice* (i.e., they aren't the sort of thing that's on every library shelf and in every used bookstore in fifteen copies, they aren't constantly in print, and if they're public domain they either don't have a digital copy available free yet or there's a reason I want a physical copy instead.)
3. they fit into a certain short list of topics of special interest that I am likely to find useful at some point.

*being able to get them on Amazon doesn't count because Amazon is evil and also I don't let myself bookshop on Amazon because I have enough of a problem already. Being able to get them in non-free-to-share ebook doesn't count because just because they're accessible in ebook now doesn't mean they will be later, and just because I have them saved as files now doesn't mean I'll be able to access the files later: learned that one hard and early.

This list is fairly static over time and fairly well refined at this point, and most of the books I buy these days fit into more than one category on it (at 3+ it's pretty much a lock to buy.) But I realized it also only existed in my head and it might be a useful exercise to write it out.

( Um, look. When I said it was a *short* list, I honestly thought that was true? )

...at least I have a nice starter list of tags to use in the catalog as I re-shelve?