Today marked a terrible first. I sold a book. Thousands of them, actually.

They left the house in 35 oversized cardboard boxes, which reminded me of another bad moment many years ago, when I sat on a train and watched a long coffin-sized cardboard box being loaded onto the next car. "HUMAN REMAINS," it was labelled, and my emotions today were much the same as then. Isn’t this a tragic, chilling thing that should be done under cover of darkness?

To a book lover, every separation from a treasured volume is a small death. (Ted S. Warren/Associated Press)That box was a harbinger (my father died soon after), and so are the boxes that left my house today. Anyone who has read Lewis Hyde’s classic The Gift knows that a work of art is not a commodity, and it is wrong to sell it for folding money. I only did the dirty deed because I live in a book-hostile neighbourhood where I have openly embarrassed myself by putting out works by (famous, readable, humane) Ben Okri and Stefan Zweig on the lawn and gotten no takers 12 hours later.

When you end up begging a recalcitrant toddler at a local day camp to take a copy of Gen Doy’s Drapery: Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture home to her mom — "It has a whole chapter on postmodern folding," you say hopefully — it’s time to retreat. “Are you sure you can’t use a tidal atlas of the North Atlantic coastline?” I called after her faintly.

The books are going to a store near the University of Toronto, where people will buy them and read them, as opposed to finding a solution for that short coffee table leg. I didn’t mention it to the BMV Books guy whose job it is to box, assess and price them, but I would happily give away anything that was guaranteed to be read.

And there’s the rub. As the market for Eat, Pray, Love grows (it is the market for female unhappiness), the clamour for Zola and Northrop Frye diminishes.

Here’s a fresh bouquet of harbingers:

• The University of Toronto is closing its Centre for Comparative Literature, founded by one of the world’s greatest scholars, Frye himself. This comes at a time when comparative literature is thriving in the great universities internationally. I was taught by Frye, a dignified, amusing, shiveringly clever man, and even I, an atheist and teenage idiot, grasped his central point, elucidated in his The Great Code, that all literature is based upon archetypes. In the West, the Bible is our mythological framework. Farewell to Frye. Waves of sadness.
• I asked my scientist girlfriend where on the internet I would find the all-Springsteen, all-the-time radio station about which she is so giddy of late. She said she got it from “the wi-fi on the picture frame of her digital photo display.” This shattered me. What I meant was, "What button do I press on my computer?" But I just shut up. No one, aside from the readers of this column, need know that I am so inept at finding radio stations that I purchased actual CDs of the 1988 BBC 4 radio show Saturday Night Fry and flew them across the ocean to play on my bedside CD player, which has a radio I have not yet bothered to master. Or that I bought the CDs of Stephen Fry’s Wodehouse-like wordplay because the literary editor of Britain’s The Observer wrote in her paper book autobiography that those shows convinced her that intelligence was not a social crime, and thus prevented her suicide at age 11. In other words, I am at sea in a world where photo frames sing Bruce. I do not think that they will sing to me. (Hands up if you got that reference — it’s pretty damn easy if you’ve read anything beyond Eat, Pray, Love.)
• The National Post has just offered to pay me to become a subscriber. (I said no, wild horses and all that.) They accosted my husband at Loblaws and offered him delivery of the part-time, half-national paper for $12.50 a month for six months, plus a free MP4 player that is a tape recorder, photo browser and, crucially for me, an e-book reader. If e-readers are free, it’s time for me to sell the books.

This is not a column about reading being under threat. It has always been under threat. It is not even a column about technology, many of the advances in which are a source of enormous pleasure to me. When I were a lad, if I wanted to hear a Boz Scaggs song more than once, I got off the couch and reset the needle. Now, I can play Lido Shuffle 40 times in a row without getting off the couch, as long as my husband is on a business trip.

Box sets of Arrested Development, Black Books and 30 Rock arrive at my office door and I memorize them and think life is highly worthwhile, a vast improvement over the days when we could only watch M*A*S*H when an American TV network decided we could, and the commercials were part of the drill. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism arrives at my door, which is a good thing, as Frye’s people are no longer around to teach it.

No, what troubles me is this: In 1994, I interviewed Douglas Coupland about my favourite of his novels, Shampoo Planet. At the time, he was upset about Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, which basically said what Scottish Calvinists and Kingsley Amis’s dad and my mother also said: that we were not put on this Earth for an endless round of pleasure. (I disagree, by the way.)

Coupland said that if the modern world was sending you too much information, entertainment, noise, whatever, then narrow your filter. It’s another version of William Morris’s rule: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

Author Douglas Coupland urges us to narrow our filter. Easier said than done. (D.J. Weir/HO-Random House)I agreed with Coupland. I narrowed my filter to exclude almost all real-time TV and movies (thank you, PVR) and widened it so I could read like a combine harvester. I read free-range. My filter looked like a snake that rapidly swallowed a series of eggs.

My problem is that my filter is no longer within my control. Strangers control it for me. I don’t want to listen to music solely through earbuds, because I love ambient sound in my house, and the labour of downloading and burning is too much for a lazy spender like me. E-readers won’t work for me until they record marginalia. I read so much that I mark interesting bits that I may want to write about years later. At the moment, I can flip through a book to find them. If Apple can’t come up with a personal greatest-hits key, e-books are not yet essential to copious readers or to researchers.

But one day they will be, and this is what hurts. What I did today was more personal than selling blood. I don’t care for my blood and neither does Canadian Blood Services (I ate too much beef in the British Isles in the late 1980s apparently). Bodies keep churning out that blood. But Michael Chabon and Kate Atkinson are middle-aged now. Their writing is finite. So are my books, grey with dust and sticky with what I do hope is Coca-Cola, and providing such splendid insulation in the basement.

Such is the difficulty of storing paper books that I am re-flooring the house to accommodate the remaining 6,000, the only things I have specifically mentioned in my will, although I doubt the children will want them. And this way insanity lies.

These are excuses. No forgiveness: I sold my books.