Book Haul

The book haul has a specific grammar. It begins with a source — a library sale, a charity shop, an estate sale, an order that arrived from three different sellers on the same day — and it ends with a pile of books arranged for documentation. The documentation can be a video, a photograph, a Goodreads list, or simply a mental accounting of what was acquired and why. The haul is an event, and events get recorded.

The library sale is the classical context for the book haul. Public library sales, typically held once or twice a year to move withdrawn and donated volumes, offer extraordinary value: hardcovers for a dollar or two, paperbacks for fifty cents, bags sold by weight at the end of the day. The pleasure is partly price and partly serendipity — you find books you were looking for and books you've never heard of and books that have nothing to recommend them except that someone else once thought they were worth owning. The unpredictability is part of the experience. You enter with a vague list and leave with a canvas bag full of surprises.

The social media book haul is a specific genre with conventions: the books laid out flat, arranged in an aesthetically pleasing pattern or simply stacked on a surface; a voice or text noting each one, usually with a brief reason for the interest; a final accounting of the total and total cost if the cost was good. The genre is watched and engaged with because it is aspirational and vicarious — you see books you might want, you hear enthusiasm for things you haven't considered, and you get the secondary pleasure of someone else's acquisition without adding to your own TBR. Or you add to your TBR, which is also a pleasure, just a deferred one.

The relationship between the book haul and tsundoku is obvious and generally acknowledged with humor. A book haul adds to the anti-library. Every book acquired goes onto the TBR until it's read, and the TBR grows faster than most readers deplete it. The book haul is tsundoku with a receipt and an Instagram caption. Readers who participate in book haul culture are largely at peace with this: the acquisition itself is part of the reading life, not merely a precondition to it. Owning books, handling them, arranging them, photographing them — these are forms of engagement with texts that don't require active reading to be meaningful.

The question of whether book hauls represent a problem — overconsumption, accumulation for its own sake, books bought for their role in content rather than their content — is one that bookish communities debate with varying levels of seriousness. The honest answer is probably that it depends on the haul: twenty books from a library sale for eleven dollars, most of which you'll read over the next two years, is a very different thing from two hundred books ordered online to populate a new shelf for a video backdrop. The haul as practice is neither good nor bad; it's what you do with the books afterward that matters.