the book jones
So, I have stuck to my no new books until September or so (barring five or six large loopholes) pledge. The toughest part was a freakishly odd self-published poetry collection at a thrift store for 25 cents. If it weren't for the rules, that would've been automatic. This instant, I got an email from a Buddhist publisher offering me a 35% discount on one title and I felt this strange displaced panicky sensation for fifteen seconds or so. I wouldn't buy from them even if I weren't intentionally restricting my bibliomania, but knowing I couldn't even consider the idea (without the "selling books to raise money, etc." loophole, which might take long enough the coupon would expire) made me feel funny.
I believe that bibliophilia's quite well and good. Loving books is different than what I'm trying to take a look at. To me, the reason I cross over into bibliomania instead of bibliophilia (by my silly and possibly errant definitions) is because I have a few traits that cross the line. The best example I can think of at the moment is how I sometimes want to by multiple copies of a book I already have for no legitimate reason. I can think of a particular example where I realized a friend had run into some difficulties and I wandered into a used bookstore and wanted to buy all five copies of Murakami's After the Quake. It was remaindered and at a great price and one of the stories in there's one of my favorite short stories ever--but the idea that having five hardcover copies to carry around while I fretted would somehow protect me from impending bad news seems to show how wacky I get on all this. I didn't buy the books then, but there have been cases where I buy a second copy just in case in a way that's inherently illogical. The day Salinger died, for example, I bought a third copy of Nine Stories because I wanted to commemorate my connection to the book, or something equally as obtuse. For what it's worth, my fave story in there is "Teddy" and the Murakami is "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo."
I could keep prattling and I could probably start to come up with other books where it wasn't the cover, the edition, or the scarcity, and my having multiple copies really just comes down to how if one copy feels good because I like what's inside the book, extra copies feel even better--but the point's that I certainly have more books than I want. Another major issue, as evidenced by the 20 books I currently have out from the library, is that I crave novelty. I'm a profligate skimmer. I'm reading at least ten books at once right now. I sometimes joke that I feel that I can pile the books high enough to keep distressing things at bay--but the point of this ramble is that I'm hanging tough (not unlike Jordan Knight who was born on this date) and dealing with this strange phenomenon of wanting to own far more books than it is reasonable or sane for me to own. On a certain level, when I worked in the gigantic bookstore I thought of all of those books as mine if I wanted them. Since I knew the store extremely well, those 200,000 volumes (or whatever) were waiting for me if I needed them. Then again, I also liked yearly inventories and midnight sales because when I stayed overnight I could feel like I lived in the gigantic bookstore instead of just living there...children's lit didn't really land for me when I was a kid and From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler didn't really grab me--but the movie version did. I live in the best library I know, but I want to weed out the, um, weeds. Having the right carefully-tended books has to be far more beneficial in the long run than just grabbing them in a non-dscriminating fashion.