I've been holding on to murder mysteries that were my fathers since 1997. I haven't read them yet, so I figure it's time to let them go. I can get books at the library if I want to read them later, and I have plenty of my own already (and a lot he sent me, which will probably stick around for a while longer, until I do read them).

I've been selling them in small lots, by author, on eBay. I've made a little money (over eBay expenses) and cleared out several feet of shelf space. This is during early days yet, at first I sold them very low just to move them out when I could see that there were a lot from a particular author for sale on eBay. Now I'm into the authors who don't appear often, and surprise, surprise, they sell for more. The last such batch more than tripled my asking price, which was a lot higher than usual.

I've improved my feedback score and as we move into spring I'm going to put up several linear feet of books, still in small lots. It's interesting to research a little and include the cover blurbs in my ads. I end up with at least a familiarity with what he was reading, and I've set a few aside to actually read, now that I'm finally looking at them. Even though I'm selling his books, I feel closer to him in the process. That's nice. And in one book (which I've kept to read) I found a note he'd written to me telling me why he thought I'd like it--that was priceless!

I will confess that I stopped at the local Half-Price bookstore today and went through their clearance shelves to find a couple of $1 copies of books to round out one of the lots I'm selling.

There's a lot more stuff that can and will go in eBay, and I have plans for a garage sale in a couple of weeks. I'm serious about decluttering, but I'm not in such a mad dash about it that I get rid of stuff indiscriminently. I've done that before and then regretted it, because I realized I was letting emotions dictate my actions, and treating family treasures as excess baggage. Anger or depression are not good tools to use for sorting out stuff, though if you have so much that it is the cause of your depression, then maybe it's exactly the right tool!

SRS