[whpalmer4]

A potential option would be to establish a "reference" context (or context hierarchy, if that suits your needs) for all the reference materials, marked as on hold or even dropped. Then you could hide it easily in context view by looking at active contexts (or remaining if you marked it as dropped). You'd still have full use of the "no context" bin, too.

[uof]

I've found this works well:

I have a folder in projects called "lists" and it has single action lists in it for things I'm thinking about buying, or do - one for books, one for dvds, one for gadgets/iphone apps etc.

All the items are under a context called "someday list" that's on hold.

I find that's better than having the whole list on hold because when I decide to actually buy something from the list I just change it's context to "errands day" or "bookshop" or whatever and it becomes a live task...