What do I do with this stuff?

a narrated list of recommendations

One of the most troublesome and relieving parts of death is that you leave everything behind. There’s a Jewish parable about a religious man who asks his children for two things: that he have a traditional Jewish burial and that he be buried in socks. After he dies, the children go to his rabbi and explain that above all else, their father dearly wanted a traditional Jewish burial and to be buried in his socks. The rabbi responds that this is impossible: if he wanted a traditional Jewish burial, he cannot be wearing socks, as Jewish tradition dictates that the body is wrapped only in a burial shroud. After a prolonged back-and-forth, the children relent—their father would have cared more about the traditional burial than the socks. Upon this resolution, the rabbi hands the children a note from their father:

By this time you will have realized that I cannot be buried in socks. I asked this task of you to show that no matter how hard you try, you cannot bring anything with you in death. Not even a pair of socks. So live fully. Leave it all on the table.

This is not an accurate translation of the Yiddish. Carpe diem, you get the gist.

But then the kids have a bunch of socks to deal with! The socks here are both literal and figurative. There are real socks but there are also the “socks” that comprise the rest of the father’s material things. What do they do with those? 

It’s a holiday season for a lot of people in the United States, so you may be spending more time with your family members, close and distant. Some of you may be visiting older relatives who still live in homes packed with stuff. And you may walk around and look at all the shelves and cellars and attics and have a swooping sense of doom overtake you. This is Stuff Stress.

Since I began this newsletter, people often ask me what to do with their parents’ and grandparents’ book, paper, and photographic stuff. Tasked with cleaning out an aforementioned cellar or attic, they are left to determine how to distribute papery belongings. Even if you or your loved ones are not deliberate collectors, you have likely accumulated a lot of stuff. So here are a few recommendations for how to deal with your papery stuff, which I’m defining as books, papers, photos, and ephemera.¹

You can read these recommendations in two mindsets: how to preserve and/or distribute your (living or dead) loved ones’ stuff. You can also read this through the lens of the oxygen-mask-on-an-airplane scenario—take care of yourself before helping those seated around you—and apply these recommendations to your own stuff. You have a stronger sense of the stuff you have than anyone else, so when it comes to sorting, organizing, and distributing it, it’s helpful to be on hand. 

The short answer to the central question of this essay is: deal with your stuff before you die. And ideally, do this process with someone else. I’m not advocating extreme minimalism; I’m recommending that you start cleaning up now. I once spent a summer as an arts & crafts counselor at a summer camp, and all the campers would tease me because I would start asking them to clean up 20 minutes before their 45-minute session ended. But I knew that it would take a long time to return the studio to some reasonable order before the next squadron of children arrived! The first 10 minutes of nagging are basically a warming-up-to-the-idea period; the real work doesn’t happen until the last five. You have to give yourself a long runway and a team to get it all done, and there’s still going to be leftovers.² 

Recommendation 0: Will your stuff 

I am not a lawyer, so I cannot give you legal advice. A basic and enduring way to take care of your stuff once you are no longer around to do so is to leave a will with clear instructions. Wills are especially important for people who might not have legal spouses, who do not have kids (biological or nonbiological), and/or who do not have strong ties with their families—depending on where you live and your familial status, your belongings could fall into the hands of someone who doesn’t care much about them. 

Such legal constraints have resulted in the loss of a lot of queer history, for example, as queer relationships were and still are not always recognized legally, so the ownership of a deceased partner’s belongings may revert back to alienated biological/legal family members who could then deny the living partner access. 

As you go through your stuff, you can update your will with specifics, but start out by thinking about who you want to take care of your things. Talk about your vision with them. And then sign a document saying so. This is not legal advice!! Please do not lawyer me. 

Recommendation 1: Identify your stuff 

In the summer of 2021, I spent Friday afternoons with my Grandma Phyllis at her apartment taking an inventory of her archive. Stored in cabinets, closets, sideboards, or bookshelves dotted around her home, it’s a sprawling range of personal and professional papers, birthday cards, poems, scrapbooks, photo albums and photo slides, newspaper clippings, and ephemera from her [REDACTED] years on earth, including materials related to her husband, my aforementioned Grandpa Sol, her six children and children-in-law, her six grandchildren, and now, her first great-grandchild. It’s an impressive sweep of stuff.

My main goal was to get a sense of the scope of the material, establish a workable order so we could easily find things again, and know where everything important lives in the apartment. What I chose not to do: itemize every item in every folder, box, or FedEx mailer. Think: identifying containers and the general theme of their contents. If you’re unsure of where to begin with a mass of stuff, these are achievable goals.

When you begin organizing, first ask yourself (and then those seated next to you) what sort of papery stuff you have: Do you keep photo albums, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, report cards, birthday cards, old schoolwork, professional documents, etc.? Where do you store these? How many containers are they in? What do the containers look like? Write all of this down, ideally in a typed document like a spreadsheet that organizes these categories of information. 

For Grandma Phyllis, I decided to record: 

• Item (e.g. wedding album, bat mitzvah album, slides, box of father’s day cards)

• Format (e.g. photo album, plastic bin, bound pamphlet)

• Description (e.g. “DVD” or “clear rectangular box”)  

• Notes (i.e. specific features or details you want to remember, like “this was Great-Grandma Betty’s plate, where Grandma Phyllis now puts her TV remotes”)

• Date 

• Location 

• Additional Notes/Recollections 

We ended up spending about four hours together for five Friday afternoons; so twentyish hours of work to build a legible record of stuff. And like all archival-ish work, I backtracked a bit here and there and redid things as I figured out what worked best for organizing the physical materials and the digital documentation.

Recommendation 2: Sort your stuff 

Once you know what you have, you can think about where it should go. Sorting stuff typically moves more quickly if one person has unilateral control of everything they’re managing. If you’re a trained archivist, you likely have a platonic ideal for organizing your own, family members’, or friends’ papers. But as archivists also know, organization should respond dynamically to materials and their use. For most people, breaking down existing containers and resorting personal papers into the categories we often see in institutional finding aids might not be useful. On the other hand, if you’re working in a bonafide paper disaster zone with no containment whatsoever, you can just start from scratch and start bucketing stuff as you see fit.

For example, Grandma Phyllis intends to give each grandchild their own “folder” (an admittedly loose term at the time, as they were worn-out FedEx mailers) filled with things that pertain to them, so gathering all photographs across folders and sorting them chronologically does not make much sense. We thus dedicated individual accordion folders to each grandchild and organized the related materials within. 

Sorting also helps us determine what’s important; after someone is no longer able to narrate the significance of objects, it’s harder to determine what to keep. As Grandma Phyllis and I flipped through clippings and papers, she told me stories about our family history that I did not know, and I jotted them down within the digital inventory so all of my family members could have access to them. Going through materials can be figuratively and literally sticky, but doing so together creates a link between the person who experienced the thing and the person charged with caring for it. So even if you, the organizer, feel that things would go much more quickly if you were left to your own devices, it is helpful to have a second set of eyes and ears to document the process and reveal new information.

This is where Marie Kondo would insert her principles about sparking joy (I enjoyed that book—her folding technique revolutionized my socks drawer). Keep, donate, throw away, etc. But I entered the Grandma Phyllis Archive Project without the expectation of throwing anything away. Sorting was an exercise in determining what should be stored together and to whom things will eventually go. Not every action has to be immediate. Understanding that this is a staging process can be especially helpful when you’re working with someone who isn’t ready to let go of their things.

Recommendation 3: Preserve your stuff

Admittedly counterintuitive to the “deal with your stuff” maxim, but this could also be understood as “prepare your stuff” for distribution or donation, which comes in many forms. Preparing stuff can be as simple as moving things from, again, so many FedEx mailers, to accordion folders and manila envelopes from Staples. Such physical preparation will likely happen in tandem with sorting stuff, as sorting and storage go hand-in-hand.³ And label everything.

Preparing your stuff can also be more high-tech, like duplicating materials to distribute access and have digital back-ups. Digitizing any of Grandma Phyllis’s stuff was not high on my priority list last summer. Except for a few scans of particularly notable finds to share with my cousins, aunts, and uncles, there was too much stuff to digitize everything—we needed more time and people. 

Earlier this summer, my aunt and uncle pitched in and gathered the 1436 photo slides that Grandma Phyllis had meticulously stored in labeled Ziploc bags inside of plastic bins and sent them off to one of those companies that transform analog media to digital media. When Thanksgiving rolled around this year—rather than negotiate for 45 minutes Thursday evening over what movies to see the next day—our family spent Friday afternoon watching some of the digitized film (from as early as 1936!) and flipping through photo slides of our parents’ childhoods.  

At the end of the evening, my Grandma asked how we were saving all of these, referring to the digital photos. What did she mean? The physical slides have now migrated from the Ziploc bags to slide sleeves in three large binders. The digital slides are stored in a Dropbox folder, and my father copied them onto a USB as well. We also recorded the watch session—both an audio recording of Grandma Phyllis narrating the photos as well as a video of the screen as we flipped through. 

The redundancy of preservation. Just as you should backup your harddrive (let this serve as the monthly reminder), you should also consider duplicating the most important stuff you want to save. Entrust the hard copies to a safe place and the digital copies to trustworthy people. Keep additional local copies on a USB or another external harddrive (i.e. not on a Cloud-based storage platform like Dropbox or Google Drive in case those clouds disappear overnight). For materials you want lots of people to see, such as photos, digitized film, or important documents, digital copies allow lots of people to have access and to keep backups in case of loss (e.g. from flood, fire, deterioration, and other forces of nature or human error). 

Recommendation 4: Get rid of stuff (i.e. how to chuck your books)

The three previous recommendations pertain primarily to paper, photos, and ephemera. I won’t make sweeping claims about which of your papers are or are not important to a future archivist, so my best advice is: keep what you and your loved ones care about, and recycle the rest. Case in point: When my great-grandfather died, Grandma Phyllis and her sister rented a dumpster to clear out all of the paper receipts from his desk. Not everything will endure, and some of history’s best discoveries come from trash heaps. Eso si que es. 

Books pose a different problem, partly because they feel more substantial and partly because we have a well-documented societal reverence for physical books, contributing to our hesitance to chuck them in the trash. We often consider donating unwanted books to public libraries (if they’re recent works) or to special collections (if they are ~not recent~ works). I’ll get back to contemporary books in the next recommendation, but if you find a number of older books that look snazzy (or look like they once looked snazzy), here are some steps to determine if it might be worth contacting a special collections library about donations.

First, ask these questions about the books: 

• What is the basic bibliographical information (author, title, publisher, place of publication, year, edition)?

• What kind of condition are they in (are the covers attached, is there water or mold damage, are there little brown stains on the pages, are the pages intact, is there a title page)? 

• Do they show signs of ownership (signatures, markings on the text, bookplates on the inside covers)?

Generally, any institution looking to acquire books wants them in very good to fine condition (i.e. not very stained, covers and pages intact, unblemished to “pristine” looking), though evidence of ownership or use is increasingly favorable. Books in decent to poor condition (i.e. grubby to outright busted) will probably be better suited to teaching collections, which I expand a little bit on below.

Next, depending on how many books you have to deal with, look them up on ViaLibri, which is a great aggregation site for all of the major bookselling websites (individual dealers, AbeBooks, Biblio, international sites, etc.). Exclude any Amazon results and anything from places like Thrift Books or print-on-demand sites—more often than not, these are not comparable copies. Even though you might not necessarily plan to sell the books, this is a quick way to figure out how common or uncommon the volumes are on the market, which will in turn gauge who might want them. 

People often find religious works in their families’ belongings, which can be hit or miss in terms of special collection acquisitions because they tend to be very common. If you have a book (or books) that turn up with only 5ish results on ViaLibri, it may be worth doing further digging for specific institutions. You can use the Advanced Search function in WorldCat, which is a worldwide library catalog that documents holdings across institutions, to see how many places hold copies.⁴

• Search the title and the publication year listed in the book—though be warned, WorldCat’s search function can be very finicky, so play around with the length of the title if you get zero hits at first. 

• Then click on “books” or “physical copies” only. 

• Double check you’re looking at results for the correct author and publisher. 

• The expanded search results will have a “number of institutions worldwide” tally, and if you really want to get into the weeds, that will expand into an itemized list. 

• TL;DR: if only a few institutions have copies (like…fewer than 10), then I would consider reaching out to a dealer.

But you’re probably going to have a bunch of books leftover. For books that turn up with more results on ViaLibri (10ish+), I would recommend starting with your local historical society; or, if universities in your area have special collections libraries (or departments), reach out and ask if they're interested in the books for either their main collection or teaching collection (the latter especially if the books are in sort of okay condition and have a lot of markings—those are great for teaching students). Many special collections websites have an FAQ page about acquisitions that may provide more information about donations.

Or you can take books to a secondhand bookseller, though they will likely go through the same steps (ViaLibri/WorldCat search, examining condition, etc.) that I've just suggested before they buy or even just take them off your hands. Or you can list them on eBay yourself.

Congrats! You’ve just prolonged the lifecycle of a book. 

Recommendation 5: Share the stuff! 

Most often, the books we find in our families’ belongings will have the most meaning to us and the people who knew them. 

At the September memorial service for Eric Sumner, a close family friend and devoted reader of this newsletter who I now miss dearly, Eric’s family made the creative and tactical decision to stage parts of his personal library on bookshelves and invited guests to take a book (or a few) home with them. A way to keep Eric’s library alive, dispersed and used by the people who loved him. And a way to clear out the many, many books that passed through his hands over time without offloading them to a public library or dumping them on the street.⁵ 

Eric’s daughter recommended one of his favorite books to me (Shipping News by Annie Proulx), which I took gratefully, and then I respectfully peeled away, trying not to dominate the bookshelves, as I am wont to do, until I saw one of my dad’s coworkers with seven books in hand! All bets were off, so I snagged a few more: Look at Me by Jennifer Egan, interpreter of maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson, Night by Elie Wiesel, Family Furnishings by Alice Munro, and At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott. I cherish them all the more because I know they were among his favorites, and I’m doubly grateful to his family for sharing his love of literature with so many people who cared about him. 

Recommendation 6: Forgive yourself and others for all the stuff 

You’ve gone through your stuff (probably a few times). You’ve decided what to keep, distribute, donate, share, chuck. There are some stragglers. That is okay. 

One of the other refrains in my work and life is people lamenting the things that their loved ones have already chucked that they would have liked to take a look at, thanks. My Grandma Van, for example, lived and worked around the world for two decades before my mother was born. In that time, she wrote hundreds of letters to her mother detailing her days in Venezuela, Indonesia, Iran, and Spain. Accustomed to downsizing before every move, those letters were tossed away during one such relocation years later; some twenty years of insights about life as an American abroad crumpled in the bin. 

It’s a stab to the gut. I would love to read those letters. But I remind myself that I don’t recycle my papers out of vindictiveness; I do so because I don’t see their utility. Or I needed to grieve and move on. I want to reduce my Stuff Stress, I want to make things easier on myself and others. So did she. People get rid of things, deliberately or incidentally. We shed! It happens. 

Advocating dispersal and dismissal of stuff might seem antithetical for someone who works in cultural heritage. But not everything is going to end up in a library; nor should it. We don’t have enough people or space in libraries to take care of everyone’s stuff. Even if we did, not everything should be stored in those types of environments—they should be more readily accessible to family, friends, and loved ones. Not everything should be available for study (i.e. the “would you want your diary in a library?” conundrum of literary archives. I digress).

These loose recommendations are introductory tools to recognize what is and is not worth saving and to get comfortable with letting go. Not everything is going to have value, for any meaning of the word. 

Also, these recommendations are oriented towards wanting to keep things, or at least, making an effort to keep some things. Oftentimes, people die and leave plenty of crap behind and you just don’t want to deal with it for whatever reason. You don’t have the time or resources or patience or interest. You didn’t have a good relationship with them. You just want it gone. That’s okay. If that reflects an experience you’ve had or one you expect to have, no essay I write will stymie the forces of indifference and entropy that drive such pre- or post-death clean-outs. Maybe you don’t have any guilt over that, but if you do, you can forgive yourself for that as well. 

Death and stuff are sticky! In writing this, I assumed that everyone in this scenario is on board, but many people are uncomfortable with the idea of going through their things because of a fear of throwing it all away. Just as I am not a lawyer, I am not a psychologist, but I’ll chock this hesitance up to grief and a fear of dying. Letting things go means that you won’t need them anymore. That’s unmooring.

Notably, Grandma Phyllis asked to go through her archive together—she already had the verve to collect these things for her family over the years and doubly so to ensure they’re well taken care of once she’s gone. And she still has her entire archive in her apartment! I didn’t show up and immediately start carting stuff out. But now I know exactly where everything is and where it needs to go. What a relief to us both that it will be entirely taken care of, whenever she’s ready for that. So you can reassure (and be reassured) that Dealing With Stuff does not mean Immediate Dissolution of Beloved Belongings. It’s a lengthy, multi-step process that you will repeat.

Case in point: I talked to Grandma Phyllis before sending this essay to make sure she was cool with me airing out our process and she reminded me that “We have not yet gone through my cookbooks!” There will always be leftovers.

Anyways. If you have further questions about any of this; or you want more specifics or advice on how to talk to someone about going through their stuff; or to tell me a story about having to clean up some stuff, or finding something really cool, or learning a new piece of history through this process, comment or shoot me an email. I’d love to hear it. Stuff stress, begone!

housekeeping and birdseeking

house

• To once again mark the conclusion of a turn through the Gregorian calendar, I am opening my inbox to questions for the second annual ask-me-anything. Books, libraries, information science, crypto (ugh, fine, sure, but it’s all a Ponzi scheme, so please don’t), fandom, etc. The things I tend to write about. What’s top of mind or bottom of soul? Send your questions my way. 

• What I read this week: Look at Me by Jennifer Egan. Borrowed indefinitely from Eric Sumner’s personal library

• Also: The Sound of Love, a project by Chia Amisola, which explores “the rawness of human intimacy and confession in the YouTube comments left under love songs.” Worth a listen.

bird

• Bird steals airpod while reporter discusses rise in thefts

More later.

1. This is not really a list of recommendations for people who have deliberately built collections and who want advice on how to relocate those to an enduring institutional or community home.

2. This was the same summer a child mistakenly pronounced my name as “Shower,” which became an enduring nickname.

3. Initially, I considered purchasing archival boxes from Gaylord Archival, but then I realized that they weren’t flexible enough for the various kinds of domestic spaces they would end up in. Once again, organize towards use and access, not towards a platonic ideal of archiving.

4. WorldCat recently redesigned its user interface, which is throwing me for a loop, but new users probably won’t find it weird. It did set off a fiery chain of emails in a rare books listserv that clogged my inbox for two days. High stakes stuff, lol.

5. I must note that Eric’s memorial was held at the same venue where my high school hosted my senior prom, which was hilarious and strange! It’s a beautiful venue. He would have found this funny.