When I was younger, I never really made a distinction between being a reader and being a book collector/bibliophile. I thought it was all the same thing. I loved reading, and I also loved books as objects, so it never occurred to me that there might be readers who didn’t also love books.
I’m not really sure how I missed that, considering that my mom is one such person. She reads (and has always read) constantly…she was even a school librarian for many years, but somehow, she never needed more than one bookshelf for herself. And even that wasn’t ever full.
Chalk it up to the self-centeredness of youth, but I actually never realized she didn’t keep books after reading them until I’d moved out, and started buying them as gifts for her here and there. She would read them, and pass them on, and I was a little put off by that for a great while. I couldn’t understand why she’d give such a gift away, even after professing to having “loved” it.
Of course she was constantly asking if I wanted this or that book she’d just read, and some I’d take, and others not, depending on if they interested me or not. Of course those books are all still on my shelves, because unlike her, I can’t bear to part with books, unless I absolutely hate them (and even then, I tend to keep them around because…
Well, I’m not sure, exactly.
My book hoarding/collecting tenancies started when I was young. We didn’t have much money (or any, a lot of the time), so we checked a lot of books out from the bookmobile, which parked by our apartment complex once a week. On occasion, we rode the bus downtown to the library, which was like a giant candy-store to me, and checked out large stacks of books to take home and read before they had to be given back.
So when I was gifted a book on my birthday or Christmas, often inscribed with a short message from the giver just inside the front cover, that was special. I treasured those books and couldn’t imagine ever giving them up. My personal library grew slowly but surely over the years, and when I finally got a job, I paid for my own clothes, gas, insurance, fast food, and bought books every chance I got.
I kept fiction and non-fiction alike, and I drooled for weeks over a beautiful leather-bound, decorative version of Gone With the Wind seen in our local used bookstore when I was in college. I wanted it, so badly, but it was $200, and I did not have the money. I still think about that book, over twenty years later, lamenting that I never was able to add it to my collection.
When I finally bought my first house, moving my books was the first thing I thought of, and four years later when I got married and moved into our current house with my husband, there was never any doubt in my mind that I’d be moving a bunch of books. Although…I’d say that’s definitely the thing I dread most about moving – carrying boxes of books.
I have a Kindle, and a Nook (somewhere), and the Kindle app on my phone. I do read ebooks occasionally, as they’re easy to access when I’m not home. But it’s not the same for me. They feel…ethereal, and when people complain that ebooks shouldn’t cost as much as a print book, I kind of agree with them, because there’s a large part of the experience that’s missing for me when reading an ebook. Yes, the story’s there, and theoretically, it’s no different than turning real pages, and it’s far, far easier to make the text bigger when necessary, but with an ebook, I don’t have the actual object to keep, to look at, to take down off the shelf and thumb through the pages, getting caught up in a random page of text that suddenly makes me want to read the whole thing again.
Though obviously, that’s why attics and basements are notoriously difficult to clean out.
This isn’t a “are ebooks or print books better” post (I am all for stories existing in every form possible), but a recent conversation with a friend about the “problem” of collecting physical books and not wanting to get rid of them has me thinking about books and what they are to different people. I think it’s interesting to note that while some of us readers are also book collectors, others are not, and the two perspectives can make for a rather wide abyss.
Will I ever get to the point where I can let go of my physical books and be content with only the “content” in digital form? Perhaps, I suppose, but I dare say only when I’m unable to move with and enjoy the physical collection any longer. And probably never for some things, like recipe books and “how tos”. Because it’s comforting to me that if someday all the electronics get fried by an electromagnetic pulse, and Google ceases to exist (along with ebooks), the information on how to survive and prosper will still exist somewhere in a physical book, for people to find and decipher.
This thinking of books as collectable objects has given me renewed motivation to get my own books back into print…or the ones that have been languishing waiting for me to finish the updates, anyways. What better books to keep in my collection than those I’ve written myself, eh?
What about you? Are you a bibliophile, a bookworm, or both?
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