Old books

I’m a bit of a collector. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say I have an addictive personality; when I was single and could afford to collect guitars, my joke was that the answer to how many guitars one needs was, “one more.” I collected CD’s when that could readily be done, and I have a pocket knife for every occasion, but these aren’t the things that I have a compulsion to hoard.

While some men’s vices are guns, grills, or grains fermented into spirits, my greatest addiction is books.

I have always been a read-er, a habit I picked up from Mama and Daddy, and as times goes on my library seems to get more and more out of control. Sometimes I find myself just looking at the shelves, equal parts excited about my collection and unnerved by the lack of organization.

There have been times I’ve considered selling or donating them, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. They bring a strange sense of permanence to my life; I see them on the shelf and remember reading them. I can recall the circumstances under which each was procured and they’re like a snapshot of that season of my life.

I could go digital and save space, but that doesn’t feel as preserved as the physical copy does.

Having the physical copy to hold makes the stories and information inside feel more real; it’s not something that can just be wiped clean off of a server or removed by a change in terms of conditions; I can run my fingers over the words and know that someone sat in an office or their home and transferred their thoughts about something and now I am reading them.

I read the words of Moses in Exodus and can believe the Red Sea parted. I read a memoir and know that someone lived the life they described. I read a Confederacy of Dunces and can see behind the curtain, just a tad, the life its author lived but disguised as fiction.

Anyway, the mail just got delivered and there’s a book about R.E.M waiting to be read, so I better go.