DO you think there is such a thing as biblioholism?
There's no doubt about it.
And it's hereditary.
My mother bought books. My father bought books.
I buy books. My wife buys books.
My daughters buy books.
We are building a house with a separate library just so we have a place for some of our books. I calculated at one point, when we were designing the house, and just to hold our current book collection we needed to design over 5,000 linear feet of book shelves into the house. That's over a mile.
And last month we gave 23 shopping bags of books to the libary book sale. But thank goodness we were away that weekend and couldn't go to the sale because we would have come back with just about as many.
But fat lot of good it did us -- we stopped off at two bookstores on our trip, they weren't the purpose of the trip but we saw a bookstore and some force grabbed us by the collars and dragged us into it -- and came home with an extra $150 of books.
Sigh.
Somerset Maugham had a wonderful essay, The Book Bag, which opens:
Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that this is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me, and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium-smoker to his pipe. I would sooner read the catalogue of he Army and Navy Stores or Bradshaw's Guide than nothing at all....
I fear that is me. For this trip I am taking I managed to reduce the number of books I am taking, for a one-week trip, down toeight, but it was a push, and I only managed it because I know there must be at least one bookstore in Texas. No matter how far from our hotel, I'm confident that we will stumble across it. |
