Some of this stuff has lasted over fifty years, old enough that the boxes themselves have memories that pull me back through the decades. I see shipping addresses, canceled stamps, scribbled lines from previous moves. The boxes stand row on row, balanced on top of each other. Sometimes I wrought well with the books and packed them so that they neatly and evenly filled the box from top to bottom, making the box solid and firm and uncompressible. I call these foundational boxes. They are the best to put at the bottom of a stack. You can fill a copy paper box neatly with paperback books, it leaves a space at the corner that you can fill with some socks to keep the books from shifting. There are small tricks you learn as you go, and I think of all the time I spent in swapping books of varying thickness from each stack, pressing down on them from the top to make sure that the stacks were all of even height and all would reach and support the lid. After the move, the boxes are jumbled because the movers don't care much for how well you optimized things, and you have to do it all again at a meta level, picking boxes that are solid to go at the base, seeing which ones got squashed in transit, inspecting the fragile ones and listening for the sounds of broken glass, and packing them neatly into closets, cabinets, attic, the garage, the living room, the bedroom... all just for now, until I get it sorted out. I'll start unpacking them soon. There are hundreds of them, each one a fossil or a casting of a bit of life, a point of connection even if it's nothing otherwise useful, more books than could be read in a normal active lifetime. I am a trifle more callous about them, after so many moves, so much time, so much money, spent on things that lurk in dark boxes, sealed in shadow, unread while I step outside into the sun and see what the future has brought to me. I will scan them this time. It's easier to scan a book when you care more about the text than about the book itself. You just cut the spine off with a bandsaw and put it in the auto document feeder. Then you... throw the book away. Over and over. Until there's room for a few more boxes of books, here and there. And the scanned books can all go onto a thumb drive, for me to read someday, some time when I am not busy scanning more books. It could be worse. There could be a fire.