He said it on a Tuesday in late April. I’d backed the van up to his garage and I was standing on his concrete driveway with the boxes between us. His mother had died in February. He’d been driving over to her house every weekend for two months, going through cabinets, deciding what was worth saving, calling siblings about the silver, calling the realtor about the carpet. The books had been left for last because the books always get left for last.
He looked at the stack — nine bankers boxes, maybe four hundred pounds of paper — and said the thing.
People love books, but they are heavy.
I’d been doing this work for years and somehow nobody had said it that plainly. He wasn’t making an observation about weight. He was telling me about the impossibility of his afternoon. He loved his mother. He had loved his mother’s library — the way it was organized, the way certain spines had been broken in by reading and rereading, the inscription on the inside cover of the cookbook she got for her wedding in 1962. He couldn’t keep them. He didn’t have the shelf space, and even if he’d had it, the act of carrying a thousand books from her house to his would have been beyond what he could do with any energy he had left in him.
So he called me. Because the alternative was to put nine boxes of his mother’s reading life in the dumpster the realtor had ordered for the rest of the cleanup. And he couldn’t do that either.
Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred
If you’re reading this, you’re probably tired
You’re probably standing in a room with too many boxes, or at least with too much sentiment per square foot. Maybe a parent died and you’re the one who had to drive over. Maybe you’re moving and the moving company’s estimate said the books would cost more to ship than they cost to acquire. Maybe you’re downsizing into a smaller place and you’ve been sorting all morning and the pile is somehow bigger now than when you started.
Whatever brought you here, the thing you’re actually facing is the same. You loved these books, or someone you loved loved these books, and now they have to go somewhere, and you can’t carry them all and you can’t keep them all and you can’t throw them away.
This page is for that exact moment.
Permission, in case you need it
You can let them go.
You don’t have to keep your father’s entire library to honor that he was a reader. You can keep three books. You can keep one. You can keep the inscription page from the inside cover and let the rest of the book go — that’s allowed. You can keep no books at all and still have loved your father.
Most of the people I work with feel guilty about this part. The guilt is real and it doesn’t make sense and the only thing to do with it is name it and keep moving. The books were a record of the reading your loved one did while they were alive. The reading was the thing. The books are residue. Beautiful residue, but residue. Letting them go isn’t letting your loved one go.
If it helps: most of the families I work with end up keeping fewer books than they thought they would. The first round of sorting picks out twenty. Then ten. Then five. Then two or three with real meaning. That’s normal. The smaller the kept stack gets, the more each remaining book matters.
What I do, in plain terms
I drive to your driveway. I bring a hand truck. I lift the boxes you can’t lift anymore. I take them to a warehouse on Edith Boulevard in Albuquerque’s North Valley. I sort them by hand, on a workbench, one book at a time.
The books that have a reader waiting somewhere find that reader. Some go on Amazon and eBay where collectors and used-book sellers buy them. Some go to APS Title I elementary schools where teachers stock classroom libraries for kids whose families can’t afford to buy books. Some go to the UNM Children’s Hospital reading program where pediatric patients pick out a book to keep. Some go to the dozens of Little Free Libraries scattered across the metro, where the next reader walking past finds them.
The books that nobody can use — the moldy ones, the truly damaged ones, the encyclopedias from 1968 — go to a regional pulp recycler that turns them back into paper. The cellulose stays in circulation. Nothing recyclable goes to landfill if I can help it.
None of this is heroic. It’s just what one person can do, in one warehouse, in one metro, on a Tuesday.
What I don’t do
I don’t pressure you. I don’t buy books at retail prices — this is a free donation pickup, not a purchase, and there’s no negotiation. I don’t sell your information. I don’t add you to a mailing list. There isn’t one.
I’m not a 501(c)(3) charity. The donation isn’t tax-deductible. The operation runs on the resale margin from books that have value — that’s how I can take the rest for free. If tax deductibility matters to your situation, Goodwill or the Friends of the Albuquerque Public Library are both registered nonprofits that can issue receipts.
I don’t take furniture, appliances, paint, or hazardous waste. Just books, magazines, encyclopedias, journals, sheet music, photo albums, VHS, DVDs, CDs, audio cassettes, and vinyl. The actual physical objects of a reading life.
If you call
Text 702-496-4214 with a few photos of the boxes or the bookshelves and your address. I’ll text back the with a pickup window. If you’re in the Albuquerque metro it’s usually. If you’re in Roswell or Carlsbad or Las Cruces or Farmington or Santa Fe it’s usually as part of the same regional run.
You don’t need to sort. You don’t need to box. Loose stacks, half-packed boxes, garbage bags, contractor bags, plastic bins, milk crates, an upended laundry basket — all fine. I have the hand truck.
If you’d rather not interact, the warehouse has a 24/7 outdoor drop box at 5445 Edith Blvd NE, Unit A. Park, drop, leave. No conversation required. Some donors find that easier on a hard day.
A last thing
The Albuquerque donor with nine boxes is on his way back to his life now. I loaded the books in fifteen minutes. He stood in his garage afterward and looked at the empty space where the boxes had been and shook my hand and said something quiet and I drove away.
That’s a normal Tuesday. The work is small. It’s carrying boxes a person can’t carry alone. It’s the books going where they’ll be useful instead of into a landfill. It’s saying out loud the thing that needed saying: it’s okay to let them go.
If today is your Tuesday, the number is 702-496-4214.
— Josh Eldred, New Mexico Literacy Project. North Valley, Albuquerque.