When I tell strangers that I work from home, the women are the ones who say, "I couldn't do that because I'd always be cleaning.  I'd never get anything done."  Which is why I strenuously try not to clean before I go upstairs to my garret, put on my fingerless gloves, and begin to write.  Recently, however, I've been sneak cleaning.  I have been trying to get rid of electronic junk.  In this house there has occurred a buildup of old computers, CD players, cameras, games, tape players, hard drives, computer printers and a copy machine from 1990 -- a work horse that just gave up.  All of these items are made of supremely toxic stuff and it isn't easy to find a place that will recycle it all.  

One reason I've thought kindly of electronic reading devices, even though we as a bookstore are devoted to the book as a book, was the thought of saving trees.  But now when I look at my bags of once cutting edge electronic rubbish, I also imagine all of the Kindles, Nooks, E Readers and other book substitutes that will get dropped, waterlogged, stepped on, smashed, or just become an old thing like any other piece of charmless crap.  

I have lots of old books, too.  I have my first William Faulkner set of mass market paperbacks bought in a basement bookstore in Harvard Square.  I have my first edition of Felix Cohen's Handbook of American Indian Law.  I have an old Materia Medica from the attic of our house in Wahpeton, North Dakota, which gives me twenty remedies for female hysteria.  I am tempted to keep listing the marvels that populate my bookshelves, but I'm on a mission here.  Does anybody want an iLamp, a seven pound Walkman, or a Tandy Stereo Mate?