Opinion |

I’ve got a book-buying disease

Compulsion leads to lack of space and money

By Brian Sylvester

Posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007, 12:00 am

I have a sickness. I can openly admit that. Once, when I was a wee little lad, my brother started collecting dragon figurines. Silly things, hardly worthy of notice. He only had about five of them. But the idea was there, lurking in my mind. Collecting things? What a novel concept.

Then my mother started her frog collection. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against frogs. But something about roughly 75 frog-shaped plush toys in various stages of dress, employment and human resemblance got my prepubescent mind whirling. It was about this time that I decided I ought to have a collection of my own.

Briefly, I toyed with the idea of collecting figurines, like my brother. But I, being a person who generally hates clutter only marginally more than I hate dust, two things that figurines invite with impunity, could not bring myself to keep the dastardly porcelain bric-a-brac around.

I removed them, with no small amount of ceremony, to a cardboard box, from whence they disappeared into the yawning maw of my father’s attic. I like to think they came to life and presently lead a happy, fairy tale life of magic adventures involving talking rodents with footy pajamas in the rafters of my father’s house, instead of merely being so much garage sale ornamentation. I like to think I’m an optimist at heart.

What I finally began to collect has since become my doom: I started to collect books. Not just books, either. Hardcover books. Paperback books. Book sets. And, after several tumultuous purchases, I started to collect bookcases. I now have five bookcases of my own, one bookcase which ostensibly belongs to my father and at least two boxes of books for which I don’t have space.

Two summers ago, I made the mistake of going into a used bookstore that specializes in hardcover used books. I walked out with $250 worth of the entire collected works of Charles Dickens, hardcover, in one handy-to-carry 50-volume set.

I haven’t read any of them.

I keep all of my textbooks. In point of fact, I have devoted one of my five bookcases entirely to college textbooks. I own a set of “The Encyclopedia Britannica Great Books,” another 50-volume set containing the best works of western thought from Aristotle to Freud. I also own the Harvard Classics, a third 50-volume set containing almost all of the exact same books as the Encyclopedia Britannica set, in a slightly smaller and more handsome binding, red in color.

This is getting out of control. Just yesterday, I went to a used book sale and purchased eight new books, six of which were hardcovers, at least three of which I already had copies of.

I don’t know if this disease has a name, but be wary. It can strike without warning. Soon, you too will be buying copies of every book ever written because you think you should have a copy of it. You’ll have to avoid the mall like the plague so you don’t go buy four new Terry Pratchett books. You’ll wonder if it’s odd to buy copies of Shakespeare’s plays when you have two one-volume collections of his entire works, solely because these ones are annotated.

And some day, when I’m old, senile and blind, my family will parcel off my voluminous book collection to other poor, sick souls who haunt estate sales and used bookstores, feeding their addiction. All hope for me is lost, I fear.

Let my example stand as a warning to you all, my dear and faithful readers. Don’t let this happen to you.

Brian Sylvester really wants a hardcover set of “Remembrance of Things Past,” by Marcel Proust.