I can put a new shirt down at the store and say, “I don’t need this, I’ve got to save money.” However, I can’t quite put that book down for the new software program I just bought, Studio 8. I end up with the book. I always do. I can justify spending $45.00 on a book, but no way would I pay that much for a shirt! How did I get this way? I’m a woman with one purse, a lot of old clothes, and over 500 books in my own personal collection.
I guess it started when I was in grade school. We didn’t have a lot of money, but my mom would always let me buy books. She would say no to a lot of the junk I wanted, but she’d always give in for the books. I couldn’t wait for the day when the book order came. I always wanted to order the magic number of books from Scholastic so I could get the free gimick that week.
Once I had the books, I always read them. But only once, rarely do I want to reread a book. More than anything, I loved owning the books, and displaying them on the bookshelf my grandpa made me. I used to spend a lot of time organizing them on my shelf. Sometimes I’d arrange them alphabetically by author, but then I wouldn’t like how they looked on the bookshelf. I still can’t stand to have a large book next to a small book. So, I’d try organizing by publishing company because they usually standardize their book covers. If I had a lot of one particular author’s book (I had every Beverly Cleary and Judy Bloom book) and if they had multiple publishers, then I’d try to put the two publishers together. I wasn’t entirely OCD about my books until I made my own card catalog. My fifth grade teacher did this for her books and I thought it was a good way to keep track of the books I would loan out to friends. The card would go in the book’s place on the shelf and the book would go out with careful instructions on how to read it- do not bend the cover, dogear, wipe your buggers on it, etc.
Needless to say, books have a special place in my heart even though the past few years I have been cursing my book collection. Since I graduated High School eight years ago I have moved 8 times. The weight of my collection has grown from R.L. Stine paperbacks to big massive Art History textbooks. Finally, I bought a house so I don’t have to move the books for a while.
I spend a lot of time using my books as a resource, just as I do the Internet. However, I don’t think the Internet has replaced the book for me. I use each for different things. If I want a quick answer I will go on Google and search. If I want to learn something like a new software program or a do-it-yourself home project, then I go to a book. The Internet is a skim-only resource. It only offers a skin deep layer of information. If a webpage has a lot of words, I don’t read them, I go to the next page. This blog, no way I’d read it and if you are still reading, then I’m sorry.
I have a special relationship with the book. Not only with the way it looks on the shelf and the design of the cover (I admit, I judge the book by its cover), but how I interact with it. I like to carry it different rooms and set it on different tables, move it, okay… I’m getting embarrassed. But the book and I know how to find what we are looking for together. I start about 3/4 the way through the book and I flip through the book toward the front. I don’t know why I do it, but non-fiction books and magazines are just meant to be read backwards. I did a quiz on time in Cosmo and it said if you read magazines backwards it means your good with money, but I haven’t found that to be true with me.. yet. I don’t know what my compulsions say about my personality, maybe when I get a laptop that I can move from table to table- I’ll like it more than my books.
