When does a book donation turn from a welcome bit of assistance into an unwanted nuisance? Perhaps after everyone has already read it, turning it into a wild success but one that doesn’t necessarily merit a permanent position on the book shelf. After all, who really needs to own a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey when all your friends have it for the borrowing anyway?

Over in England, the country’s charitable organizations are stuck under a “paper mountain” made of thousands of unwanted copies of the trilogy of so-called “Mommy porn,” reports The Telegraph.

Maybe readers are bored or perhaps — and I’m going out on a limb here — no one wants a copy to cherish as the pride and joy of their library. It’s not a matter of just repurposing them for their paper, either. Apparently in England, the books can’t be recycled due to the kind of glue they’re bound with.

It’s getting into an annoying one step forward, two steps back situation, say charity organizations like  Cancer Research UK. Once one of the books sells, two more donations come in in its place.

“Our shop managers have reported that hundreds of donations of Fifty Shades over the recent months,” said the organizations books manager. “We always welcome donations, but the secondary sales potential of the novels is a big problem. Nobody wants it anymore.”

The marketing manager for a site that sells books says there’s been a rush to get rid of the things recently, now that the fetish furor has calmed. He says the company is going to wait to try to sell them again when the movie comes out.

“We have thousands of copies of all the Fifty Shades books, but we’ve stopped selling them because no one was buying them,” he explains. “People are offloading them now in droves as all the hype has died down, it’s becoming a paper mountain.”

For anyone seeking to find a creative way to ditch the books, there’s a Facebook page dedicated to that very endeavor: 50 Ways of Killing 50 Shades Of Grey. Chucking it out your window at a yowling cat has been said to work in my immediate vicinity.

Charity shops stuck with thousands of copies of 50 Shades of Grey [The Telegraph]

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