I’ve broken through the veils of denial. I can admit it now: I am a book hoarder. Granted, I certainly read plenty of books. There might be some logic in stockpiling a few. But does anyone need several hundred?
I’ve always had a library, and when I moved from Boston to Los Angeles in 2000 I brought it with me. And then at some point when I was living there I took on the habit of shopping for books at thrift stores. I found good stuff. Books at thrift stores tend to be 1-3 dollars or less, so it’s easy to let yourself go crazy. “Oh, I’m sure I’ll probably want to read this someday” or “If I get locked in my apartment for two months I can read this to distract myself from starving.”
I was also buying books for their covers alone. This habit set the hoarding into high gear. I can date its extreme manifestation to the spring of 2005, when I was working at a Starbucks in Pasadena. I didn’t have a lot of money, but apparently I still had a strongly developed hunter/gatherer instinct. I mean I wanted to shop. Thrift stores provide a good service here for poor people. And I adore book cover illustration, particularly cover art from 60s and 70s paperbacks. I was buying these at a quarter each, building a collection at less than a dollar a week (when I was lucky enough to find good ones). I collected copies of Wuthering Heights (available, over the years, in a dizzyingly delightful plethora of paperback covers) and the works of Daphne du Maurier and Agatha Christie, plus any good 60s gothic romance or sci fi paperback. Of course I would also buy books to read. Suffice it to say my library grew.
I’ve shed books many times over the years, but the library, like some unkillable monster, grew back every time. Well, I’ve just moved again, for the third time in two years, and this time, something had to give. Rest assured, I am not bookless. I kept a few more than a hundred. But I got rid of my paperback Wuthering Heights collection and the Patricia Highsmith novels I had read before (with the exception of my two favorites, This Sweet Sickness and A Suspension of Mercy). Things I never would have let go of in the past. So something changed. I had an epiphany.
I had a good laugh when I read “Oh, I’m sure I’ll probably want to read this someday” or “If I get locked in my apartment for two months I can read this to distract myself from starving.”
ReplyDeleteI hoard superfluous, plastic trinkets of no resale value. Plastic toys cover every flat surface of my house. The overflow of crap sits in my barn, discolored from the sun, gathering a thin sheen of dust and grease. Buyer's remorse keeps these objects rotating in and out of storage, giving me a false sense of their 'value'. Books seem like a much more sophisticated form of hoarding. Especially because your book collection isn't a dirty little secret to keep hidden from the world. (Well, um, it's just a relatively small portion of my library that would take serious explaining - Hah!).