I know most members of this group are probably readers and not collectors of books. However, I would guess that a good percentage have large collections of mystery/detective books. I know I've been a collector/reader for decades, ever since I was a teenager. To answer the question "...what sane person wants to fill up their entire living space with books...", there are quite a few members that would have to answer "I want to do exactly that".
I cannot imagine living without my personal library of thousands of books, vintage paperbacks, pulp magazines. I've learned two basic things about collecting, the first being that the non-collector will never understand the collector. Why? Because the non-collector sees the collection as clutter, a waste of time, space, and money. This leads to the second thing I've learned: never take the advice of a non-collector concerning your collection. They simply do not know what they are talking about. They don't really know the enjoyment a collector gets from the collection and where the collector sees beautiful first editions with dust jacket, the non-collector sees an old book that should be thrown away or sold for cash.
I've looked at the Kindle and it just can't begin to compare with the feel and enjoyment I get from a real, hard copy book.
----Walker Martin.
--- On Fri, 11/6/09, Patrick King <abrasax93@yahoo.com> wrote:
The more salient question is, what sane person wants to fill up their entire living space with books they're going to read five times in their lives and never look at again? What's the thing about possessing all this stuff and keeping it all around you? I've been divesting myself of 40 years of book collecting for the last 3 years. I'm down to 2 bookshelves full of things I really do refer to. Some of these I've already replaced with e-editions.
Patrick King
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