Of late, I've had to deal with my own hoarding. I wanted to work for TSR writing for D&D, so I tried to collect everything for D&D so I'd be familiar with their copious content. I had everything I could get my hands on from 1E well into 3E, even when TSR was no more. And that doesn't count the mounds of miniatures, Dwarven forge terrain and the amount of non-D&D RPGs & Wargames I've collected over a lifetime of 40+ years of gaming. The gasps from those seeing my collection for the first time make me swell with pride and realize how lucky I've been to be able to collect all this stuff, but it's just too much stuff taking up too much space. The reality is, I'll never get to use all of it, or even a quarter of it.
In the past few years, a good hunk of it went into storage. I brought back a limited amount back into my active collection - about a quarter of the entire thing. Some of it I sold off - duplicates mostly, as well as some items that had later been combined into collections (such as the various reiterations of the Dragonlance modules or the Queen of Spiders that combined G1-3, D1-3 & Q1) or simply the same book with a new cover and layout (like the black cover versions of the 2E rulebooks). In my non-D&D books I culled down to only the latest or favorite version of the game (such as my WEG Star Wars and L5R 4th edition books). Slowly, I've been trying to sell off parts of the collection that have been in storage.
Every so often, I do find myself pulling something out storage to go through, but more often than not a quick perusal reminds me that I don't need it, never will use it and it would be better off in someone else's hands whose more likely to get use out it. It's a slow, painful process to give up those old books and whatnot, and I don't force myself to get rid of anything - I only purge when I've gotten comfortable with the knowledge that it's been out of sight so long, I'm not going to miss it.
I've been trying to tell myself that I'm going to purge more and switch over to PDFs instead - they take up a lot less space and with a large iPad, the tablet I'm seeing it on is the full size of a book. However, it takes some effort to make the switch, and there's times you just can't beat the beauty of a printed book and the joy of flipping through a double-page spread of a real book. But I'm slowly getting there. And most of all, my back thanks me for not lugging around a 30+ lb. backpack on game day.
If I could, I'd reduce my game library down just down to a handful of books and the two to three RPGs I play on a regular basis. But that's years away, and I'm not in a hurry. I'm just slowly trimming away at the excess where I can.
