Recently, I received a directive from the chairman of the board of directors that governs my domestic partnership.

The order, an indirect consequence of a trip to Billings a few weeks ago, was a simple one, and my wife issued it in one succinct sentence: “Something has to go.”

While in Billings, I made the mistake of visiting a well-known establishment, one whose main feature is a large space filled with shelves full of books. Three of those books ended up on the table next to the chair I normally occupy when at home, joining a significant number of books already in line to be read.

Well, I would have started on them immediately, but I was on the library’s list of petty criminals holding books beyond their due date, and the nice ladies there had been politely requesting its return for about a month. So I dropped everything else on my agenda in favor of wading through the last three-quarters of a tome comparing primitive societies with our advanced culture. Once I began to focus on this project, I finished it in a remarkably short time, and it’s now safely back on a library shelf in downtown Powell.

I then turned my attention to the new books, skipping over a number of other books on my “to-be-read-someday list.” As it happens, one of the books, a biography of Walter Cronkite, is huge, nearly 700 pages long, so I decided to tackle the two shorter books, which, added together, are only about half as long as the Cronkite volume. Consequently, it didn’t take long to learn about the psychopathic killer who played a large role in putting together the Oxford English Dictionary and examine the conflict between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Charles Lindberg over American participation in World War II. I finished them both in a couple of days.

I then turned the two slim volumes over to my wife, whose job it is to put books on a shelf for future reference. Her husband insists on that because he hates to throw away a book if it has any educational value at all.

Unfortunately, despite the presence of shelves that, when placed end to end, would likely stretch from our house to the Corbett bridge, there wasn’t room for two more books, even two short ones.

Hence, my wife’s directive that I have to get rid of one or more books.

Well, that wasn’t hard, really. A couple of paperback novels quickly lost their places in a cupboard — actually a converted gun cabinet, reflecting my position that the pen is mightier than the sword – because, even though I hadn’t read either one of them, I was unlikely to do so. I’m pretty picky about what novels I read, and these were two I could well do without. I then turned to the task of reducing the size of the to-be-read-someday pile.

There will come a day when I will once again be ordered to discard another book, but I have managed to push that day back a bit. The next two books on my reading list, one about training work elephants in Burma and the other about President Eisenhower’s handling of relations with the USSR, don’t require shelf space. They were purchased in digital form and exist only as computer code on my iPad. I also noticed, while looking for discardable tomes last week, two or three unread books that already have spots reserved on a shelf, so no new space will be required when I finish reading them.

As you can see, then, I am thoroughly engaged in projects of great importance, including the one I am working on right now, writing this column for the benefit of you readers. Writing it, along with all those other projects, is doing wonders for my morale and when it’s finished, I won’t need to find shelf space to store it.

I hope you enjoyed reading it.