In May of 2015, my wife and I completed our move to Richmond, Virginia. For the first time in our lives, we were homeowners, and we quickly discovered that the property dollar went farther than it had back on Long Island.

To cut a long story short, we achieved a lifelong dream by designating one of the rooms in our new home as a library. Books that had been stacked one atop another in New York, crammed into any available crevice, now had room to stand tall and vertical on our shelves.

And they didn't fill the shelves, either. For the first time, we actually used our bookends. The future was wide open and full of potential.

But that was almost four years ago, and our library has grown since then. Let me rephrase that -- our library has remained the same size, but the collection inhabiting it grew. One by one, the bookends went away, and soon our paperbacks were turning horizontal in order to maximize our space.

Of course, other rooms were colonized in that time, much like the Roman empire pushing ever outward to bring resources to the capital. History teaches how that wasn't sustainable for the Romans, and it certainly wasn't for us. Something had to give. We had to, gulp, get rid of some books.

But where to begin? How to bear parting with these companions of my youth, many of whom had moved with me across half a dozen states?

I found one or two that I didn't mind letting go, and when I had given those up, I found one or two more. Slowly but surely, I began to develop a set of rules to govern my collection. I now use these three principles whenever I reevaluate my library.

Do I want to read it?

Okay, when you put it like that it sounds obvious, but I promise it felt nothing of the kind. There were books that I owned simply to own, with no thought of eventually consuming. Atlas Shrugged is a fine example. I had some obscure notion of needing to read it to better argue against it, but that's no kind of life. Out it went, along with others of its ilk.

The above question applies even more to books I have already read. Would I consider rereading it? Rereading is a compliment not paid to every book, of course, but if I'm left with the feeling that I never want to crack its pages again, why is it on my shelf? Goodbye, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Would I recommend it to someone else?

This, in addition to rereading, is the best reason to hold onto a book you've already read. I can't tell you how often I've been deep in a conversation about literature that ended with me handing over a treasured volume to a friend who would get to experience that story for the first time.

That conversation can go many ways, though, and sometimes the conversation around a book turns to why I would not recommend it. Well then why in the world is it taking up my precious shelf space? Goodbye, Warded Man and sequels.

Is this book important/unique/distinctive/beautiful?

I love a beautiful book. The Franklin Library made some of my favorites, and I have a scattering of them on my shelves. Nowadays, I turn to the Easton Press.

Sometimes, I worry less about what they contain and more about how they'll look on my shelves. Is that vain and superficial? Maybe, but I've also found that having a book on my shelf is a gateway drug to reading it.

So those are my rules. And while they may not have reduced the total number of books on my shelves, they have certainly increased the overall quality. If I can't have a bigger and bigger library every day, at least I can have a better and better one.