July 18, 2006
Further Notes on a Pretentious Habit
Rita, PG, and Amber Taylor discuss the deification of book-ownership in response to my last post defending private libraries.
Rita left this comment:
People at places like the U of C, where there is much social capital to be gained from being or seeming well-read, seem to covet the physical book more than the stuff in it (at least, this is my impression from reading lj's where people talk about acquiring books all the time (squee!), but almost never about their content). It just seems like a chic way to spend disposable income and to cultivate an undeservedly erudite reputation.
PG defends hoarding, but prefers to keep her books stockpiled at her family's house rather than move them with her through school and work. (My family might argue, from the several hundred books still stacked in my closet at Indiana, that I am not in fact moving my books with me either. I would say it is half and half at this point.)
Amber has long been a defender of a small and well-chosen library:
While in certain circumstances, people may be too busy or too isolated to borrow books before reading them, to keep a mediocre book one has bought indicates a certain acceptance of mediocrity. Similarly, one might purchase a book with the intention of reading it later, but at a certain point the timeline of future reading stretches out so far as to make it clear that some of these books will never be read and one becomes an Imelda Marcos of books, compulsively collecting (whether it be for the undeservedly erudite reputation that Rita notes or for the vanishingly tiny benefit of additional reading options).
I will be the first to admit that I have never read all of the books that I own, and likely never will. I will also concede that this is somewhat analogous to the maligned oenophile who buys wine faster than he will ever drink it. I also agree that buying books merely to appear to have read them, or to appear to be the kind of person who might one day read them, is unseemly. [But understandable; before we went to college, I deliberated for several hours with co-conspirator Matt Hengeveld about what books we should take to our respective institutions. We definitely thought about what books it was important to have for signalling purposes-- The Fountainhead, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, &c.-- but we were using books to signal our genuine tastes, not to project false pretenses.]
But of course there are legitimate species of book-hoarders, too. (I fancy myself one.) Owing to my dubious proclivity for rapid-fire and vaguely obscure quotation, I frequently find myself looking to call a book to hand halfway through an email, an academic footnote, or a pen-and-paper letter. And owing to my work habits, these moments usually occur in the middle of the night, when libraries and bookshops are closed.
Indeed, the approximate onset of my book-a-holism can be traced to two events. One was a day my second year of college when I was writing a slate of questions for a College Bowl tournament, convinced that what I needed was a question about Hedda Gabler. However, I was unable to locate a satisfactory translation on the internet, and it was an hour after the last literature library on campus had closed. How could I-- a devout Ibsen fan, and the owner of at least two copies of the play-- not have a copy on the shelves of my dorm room? But I didn't, I had to drop Hedda until the next tournament, and I remain slightly scarred by the experience. I love to write, but I am a sufficiently inconsistent writer that I can't afford losing inspiration to practical difficulties.
Finally, I find that a well-ordered (and very broadly-stocked) bookshelf helps me order my thoughts. The outlines for both my required 2-L paper and my required 3-L came while I was sitting in the living room of my apartment staring at all of my books on property, land use, state constitutional law, and so on. Those who have the discipline to read (and think) in straight lines and square corners can afford to acquire books one at a time, reading through them and then deciding whether or not to finally grace them with a tenured or tenure-track position on a shelf of honor. I skim, begin, discard, revisit, scrawl in, lend, and recall books promiscuously. Yes, I could try to curb all of these habits, but to what end?
So, I'm in agreement with the above bloggers (and assorted unemurated commenters and e-mailers) that it is bad form to acquire books purely for appearances' sake, or without caring about what is inside them. But not everybody with a large and fairly indiscriminate stack of unread and unreadable stuff falls into this category. Some of us are just disorganized, mentally or otherwise. Comments (10)
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