Our topic this week is old books, on which I’ve received several recent inquiries.

First, of course, we need to get over believing an old book cannot morally be discarded. When I worked on several large summer book sales in Brunswick, we were faced, at the end of the sale, with disposing of up to 10,000-12,000 books. All of these had been through the entire sale without being sold. Many were not sold primarily because of their condition, but sometimes it was just because of their relevance to modern readers.

On the last day of the sale, we sold books by the bagful for $2 or $3 per bag. That was essentially giving them away. People were appalled when we started discarding the leftovers, but the librarian at that time observed that, if we couldn’t even give away what was left, there was no point in keeping them another year. We do nobody any service by trying to keep broken down books on the shelf. Being old is not the same thing as being valuable.

If a paperback book is so worn that you can’t read the spine, some pages are loose, or the cover is separating from the text block, the book cannot be salvaged. That’s also generally true of hardback books that are falling apart.

The real question is not whether to dispose of them, but how best to do it.

A hardback book consists of two major parts: the cover and text block. The cover is generally a poor quality material that is covered with paper, cloth, vinyl, or leather. The poor quality and coverings make them a problem for the processors at the paper mills. The covers get separated out in the pulping process and passed into the trash. Whether they are then put into a landfill or burned in a trash to energy plant will depend on the mill doing the processing, not on the company that picks them up from the curb.

The text block is mostly glue and, especially in older books, some small string. These will also be screened out in the reprocessing operation at the paper mills.

A paperback book is mostly just paper and glue, so those are easy for the processing mills.

That means that books can be recycled. To ensure that the covers don’t end up in a landfill (at least not after we switch to ecomaine, which will burn them for energy), tear off the hard covers, then put those into the trash and the text block in recycling. Paperback books can be just placed in the recycle bin whole. Casella’s processors don’t handle books so well, but they can accept one or two at a time. If you have a large number, you can call them to make arrangements for them to be collected.

The Recycle Bin is a weekly column on what to recycle, what not to recycle, and why, in Brunswick. The public is encouraged to submit questions by email to brunsrecycleinfo@gmail.com. Harry Hopcroft is a member of the Brunswick Recycling and Sustainability Committee.