On owning books

I love books.

Like, obviously. Reading is my primary form of entertainment. I work from home in a library-converted-to-office, with my desk sitting agains the only wall that isn’t covered by books.

I track my reading. I’m not keeping score; I just have a poor memory and so I like taking notes on what I read and what I want to remember.

And I do like OWNING books. I don’t shy from the physical manifestations of ownership either: they all get marked with a custom Ex Libris rubber stamp that I made in college. I write in the margins. I tape in supplemental material. I even chop up large volumes and rebind them into more convenient packages.

But I have reached a point where I am increasingly confronted with the question that plagues every book lover: why do you own all of these?

My guiding principal on book-buying used to be: only acquire it if you intend to read it more than once. That means many times I would read something from the library, and then go buy myself a copy to keep. Sometimes there’s a book I want to read for the first time, and it’s just so much easier to pick up a throwaway used copy. And sometimes, I’ll admit, I buy and keep books for sentimental or ego reasons. (There’s a shelf dedicated to ‘my friend wrote this.’)

But there’s aspirations and aspirations. When I put my hands on a book to cull the collection, I usually think: oh, I want to read this again. But I’m middle-aged! The number of books I can plausibly read again is limited, and I still love reading NEW books.

And I’m running out of space. The shelves are full. I certainly edit and discard stuff frequently, but this week I really started to think I could let a lot of these go.

Like: fifteen years ago I was interested in reading everything I could about Prester John, and collected maybe twenty semi-rare books on the topic. I enjoyed that season of reading and collection - but will I ever dip into those again? Probably not.

Or: we collected a whole bunch of young adult fiction that I loved, with the idea that they’d be available for my kids as they grew up. But surprise: the kids of two avid readers turned out to… prefer their screens? Go figure.

So: I think that editing these shelves is just going to be an ongoing process of evaluation and culling. And a bit of saying goodbye to a planned future that isn’t going to happen.

What a weird feeling.