One of the best parts of my teacher-librarian role is buying new books. Lots of shiny, crisp, fresh-off-the-press, virgin-spine books. Ah, resource acquisition - such a wonderful phrase. Tingles zap along my spine, and my Pavlovian drool reflex kicks in just writing it. But, as is often the case with pleasurable endevours, there’s a price to pay. And I’m not talking dollars here. I’m talking about the dirty, sad business of culling the collection.

Culling, weeding, deselecting—the language says it all. It’s the process of removing resources no longer needed or suitable for the collection. As a librarian, I’m a ruthless ninja culler. If it hasn’t been borrowed in the past three years, it goes. If it looks like it’s been through a blender, it goes and is only replaced with a new copy if it hasn’t been superseded by something recently purchased. Hundreds of books each year, pulled, stripped, wiped from the system. It's cutthroat but necessary because shelf space is premium and everyone wants new and shiny. Readers are fickle like that.

But from a writer’s point of view this task is heartbreaking. As a writer, I know how many months, if not years, go into writing that first draft. How many more months, if not years, go into editing, polishing, and moulding that manuscript to make the story within shine so brightly people can’t help but pluck it off the shelf.

However, reality often leaves even shiny new books in the shadows. Among every 100 culled books there are a good 10 to 15 that have never been borrowed. Never! Gahhh! Shot straight to the writer’s heart. It’s these books, and their creators, that I feel for the most. And before I press the delete button on their records, I channel Sherlock Holmes and Harry Dresden as I frantically thumb their never-turned pages and scrutinize their covers (crappy covers are often the culprits, but that's another blog post) for clues, anything to help me understand why not one single person felt compelled enough to pick up these books and allow them to whisper their story.

As a librarian I do this to inform my future book-buying decisions. As a writer I do this to avoid making the same mistakes; to escape being left sitting on the shelf after all the blood, sweat and RSI I’ve gone through to get that story into readers’ hands.

In so many ways writing is a lottery. No one truly knows what will capture readers’ imaginations and hold their attention. In the meantime the cycle continues: in with the new and shiny and out with the old and never-borrowed. 

It's a book eat book kind of world.