The collected book adds all outbound addresses and gets large quick. But if that is what you want to do you drag and drop contacts between books. Select the personal book folder so it displays in the main window Select the contacts to move. Hold the control key while clicking to select more than one. Drag the contacts to the new book folder and drop them there.

You can create new address books from the File menu in the address book window File-New-Address Book

It would make more sense to me to create a new book and move unwanted contacts out of the personal book. The default when adding new contacts is the person a book.

Quinby1 said

All addresses in my contacts list are under "personal address book" and none in "collected addresses". The personal address book is too long and filling up with addresses I seldom (if ever) use. I'd prefer new addresses that are automatically added go into the "collected addresses" list, and would like to transfer all seldom-used addresses to that list.

Thanks for your solution. Not sure why but my collected addresses was empty and new email addresses from emails I was sending out were not going to "Collected Addresses" but to "Personal Addresses" instead. Anyway, I've moved them manually and hopefully found a way to change the setting so new addresses go to "Collected Addresses" list.

From the Menu Bar select Tools-Options-Composition-Addressing

You set where the outgoing addresses are collected there. It must have gotten changed because the default is to the Collected Book.

No Menu Bar with Tools? Press the alt key.