We bought a lit­tle less than 3 acres of meadow a few weeks back. And soon we are going to have to build a house.

Our cur­rent house is a ser­vice­able 1960s colonial-​​style with three super­nu­mer­ary bed­rooms (we use two) and 4 bath­rooms and a par­tially fin­ished base­ment and a two-​​car garage, all full of crap. Our new house, which will be all cus­tom and handicapped-​​accessible and energy-​​efficient (and made mostly out of sty­ro­foam and saw­dust), will also be nicer because it will be much less full of crap.

I don’t think it will be much big­ger. So you do the math.

Hang on — did I just say “crap”? Bad me. Far more accu­rate if I say desir­able and hard-​​to-​​find gently-​​used items at rock-​​bottom prices.

Any­way, hows­about you see if you can make this fine stuff stop being my crap? We need the room. In a tripping-​​over-​​knee-​​high-​​piles kind of way. In an “Oh yeah did I men­tion the 20-​​by-​​10 stor­age facil­ity full of books?” kind of way.

Until I get a cer­tain minor RSS and Ama­zon Mar­ket­place API thingie worked out, I find that I must to draw your atten­tion to this by brute force. Viz, just look at these pleas­ant and allur­ing items on offer at Ama​zon​.com, where there are about 250 books today, and will be maybe 5000 when we get done sort­ing out boxes:

• Make Way: 200 Years of Amer­i­can Women in Car­toons by Monika Franzen, Nancy Ethiel. Uni­ver­sity of Chicago, 1987.
• Occultism, Witch­craft, and Cul­tural Fash­ions : Essays in Com­par­a­tive Reli­gion by Mircea Eli­ade. Chicago, 1978.
• The Threat and the Glory: Reflec­tions on Sci­ence and Sci­en­tists by Peter Medawar. Oxford, 1991.
• More Steve Allen on the Bible, Reli­gion, & Morality/​Book II (More Steve Allen on the Bible, Reli­gion & Moral­ity) by Steve Allen. Prometheus, 1993.
• Sci­ence and First Prin­ci­ples by F.S.C. Northrup. Ox Bow Press, 1979.
• Ein­stein as Myth and Muse by Alan J. Fried­man, Carol C. Don­ley. Cam­bridge, 1989.
• Life at the Edge of Chaos: Cre­at­ing the Quan­tum Orga­ni­za­tion by a Bunch of Crack­pot Scam-​​Artists Mark D. Young­blood, John Renesch (Edi­tor). Perce­val Pub­lish­ing, 1997.
• Story of Stu­pid­ity: A His­tory of West­ern Idiocy from the Days of Greece to the Present by James F. Welles. Mount Pleas­ant Press, 1988.
• De fig­uris Veneris: Man­ual of clas­si­cal ero­tol­ogy by Friedrich Karl For­berg. Hol­loway House, 1967.
• The Pomo Tarot: A Post­mod­ern Deck for Nav­i­gat­ing the Next Mil­len­nium by Brian Williams. US Games, 1994.
• License Your Inven­tion by Richard Stim. Nolo Press, 1998.
• Graph­i­cal Exploratory Data Analy­sis by S. H. C. DuToit, A. G. W. Steyn, R. H. Stumpf. Springer, 1986.
• The Ven­ture Cap­i­tal Cycle by Paul Gom­pers, Josh Lerner. MIT Press, 1999.
• Real­ity is What You Can Get Away With by Robert Anton Wil­son. Dell, 1992.
• Wilde West by Wal­ter Sat­terth­waite. St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
• The Pry­dain Com­pan­ion: A Ref­er­ence Guide to Lloyd Alexander’s Pry­dain Chron­i­cles by Michael O. Tun­nell. Henry Holt, 1993.
• Obfus­cated C and Other Mys­ter­ies by Don Libes. Wiley, 1992.
• Tetrascroll by R. Buck­min­ster Fuller. St. Martin’s Press, 1982.

And oth­ers. Many, many, many others.

You want books. You read — I’ve seen you doing it. Just, you know… do it more.