We’re organizing the library in our new house in North Carolina. While the living space is generous, the library will still consume two-thirds of the bottom floor. Right now that space is a mess, filled with stacks of books waiting to find their proper shelving.

Due to a series of moves, our books have been largely stuck in boxes for three years. Before moving up from Texas, we did purge hundreds of them and about a thousand LPs. But most of the boxes remained and were wheeled onto the truck.

Since arriving in September, these boxes have waited for the magic moment to be transformed back into a library. That magic moment got delayed by my travels and by two hurricanes named Florence and Michael. Those two storms exposed the need to replace two sump pumps, add a third, and redo the yard’s system of drainage. These kinds of “water issues” did not affect us back in North Central Texas, nor did we envision what it would be like to bail out sump pumps when the electricity goes out, as it does frequently here in wintertime.

But ah! Worry not, my books. Three shiny new sump pumps with triple battery back-up have arrived and are nearly in! They couldn’t be more handsome if they had been knights riding on white steeds. You will stay dry, I promise.

Flood, fire, and gnawing creatures have been the enemies of books throughout history. Back in our office in Bowie, Texas we actually had some bookworms get into a shelf of books. Before that, I thought they were made-up, even though the academic part of me knew better.

But here’s one problem we cannot plumb or spray away: what does one do with all these books?

Let me reword. How did Hank and I manage to acquire so many books? Some, of course, were gifts—often astonishing gifts of precious copies given by people important to our lives. But the majority were bought, and, particularly in the case of my Russian books, hauled across the ocean in suitcases.

And that’s the real problem. Virtually every book (likely your books too) contains not just words, but a story behind it—a story so strong that sending titles away . . . wherever . . . falls somewhere between painful and impossible.

I look with admiration at the trendy de-cluttering guru Marie Kondo. Worldwide and to great acclaim she preaches her mission of sparking “joy through tidying up.” In her successful Netflix series called, appropriately, Tidying Up, she says “my mission is to spark joy in the world through tidying.” Her system involves the reasonable formula of asking whether an item sparks joy or not. If not, it should go away.

That’s good, isn’t it? Actually, it’s brilliant. I wish I’d thought of something so powerful.

Except it’s not cut-and-dried. What if most of the books in question do “spark joy”? I guess when you put each title on the cutting block, the question becomes “how much joy?”

If there’s a ready recipient for give-away books, the process is far easier. You are “sharing the joy.” Or, if one gets desperate (like cleaning out a shed the night before a move), then repositioning books to libraries or the Salvation Army becomes easier. But otherwise, it’s like parting from puppies.

May I offer an example of one such puppy from the shelves along our south wall. We designated that stretch of bookcases as the spot for my Russian collection. Nearly all of my Russian books are back on the shelves there now: Russian history and literature, musicology and bibliography, art, ballet, theater, atlases and dictionaries (Russian-German, Russian-Croatian, Russian-Polish, etc.), books on Russian Orthodoxy, and musical scores by Russian composers, from symphonies and operas, to piano and chamber music, to folk songs.

The shelf space allotted seemed adequate until I pulled them out of the boxes. Before you could say Jiminy Cricket, the whole wall was full. I don’t know what astonishes me more: the sheer number of these books or the fact the fact that I’ve used virtually all of them.

Yet, while standing there astonished, I have to accept that much of this Russian collection is obsolete. Virtually all of the historical books (that’s a ton, believe me) were written under political stress during the Soviet period, which meant that the authors had no choice but to tiptoe around facts or rewrite them. I understand this. My dissertation topic was chosen precisely for the same reason in order to improve the chances that, by working on an ideologically “safe” topic, I would gain access to desired archives in Leningrad and Moscow.

But what do you do with a “puppy” like a tattered Soviet-era anthology of choral music that contains some of the few pieces of Russian sacred music allowed to be published under Communism? I call such items my “Spring is Here” books, since they passed censorship by being tweaked to fit the prevailing ideology. In the case of this choral anthology, all of the notes are accurate. But the texts? “Behold the mystical Cherubim” or “Come and bow down to the Lord” is rendered “Spring comes to our Fatherland” or “The Fields are bursting with Grain.”

At certain points in Soviet history, this kind of publication was as close as most Soviet music students were going to get to their incomparable heritage of sacred music. Today such volumes are historical curiosities. Do I keep them?

There is no good solution to our problem. We will cull a few volumes (a hundred or so), concentrating on titles that would be good for the local library book sales. But overall, the books are going to stay right here. And we’ll laugh at our idea that we would have ample wall space for paintings once the library was complete.

Still the bottom line is clear. When the work is done, hopefully in a few more days, we’ll have back at our fingertips what both Hank and I consider the greatest treasure of our household: our library. Come see us, and we’ll give you a tour.