Confessing to a Weakness for Books

This is clearly a good week for sordid public confessions. It is also a week when we are running a Centerpiece story on bookstores.

This juxtaposition may seem irrelevant.

But it isn’t. In fact, it offers just the right opportunity to confess to a debilitating personal weakness of my own: I lust after books. And that isn’t the half of it. I also lust after other people’s books and most of the books in bookstores, at least the hardcover ones.

I like to hold books and to smell them. I like to see the wood of my bookshelves straining under the weight of too many tomes. Sleep is impossible unless I can reach out and feel the unstable hill of books and periodicals piled up and spilling onto the floor next to the bed.

And I know neither control nor discretion. Instead of nurturing a solitary vice--hoarding and reading in private and in the semi-dark--I shamelessly and indiscriminately push books onto friends and loved ones. Even children.

As bad as all this sounds, at least I haven’t descended to the level of degradation as my friend who spends so much money stockpiling first editions that he is reduced to living in squalor.

I may love books, but the comfort level achieved from owning, say, a rare copy of Riker’s “History of the Popes,” could never compensate for the discomfort inherent in reading it from a rat-infested Barcalounger.

But as Ann Shields points out in her story on Page 56, there are enough people who, if not obsessed with, are at least interested enough in books that bookstores, particularly the megastores, have evolved into major hangouts.

Not only are people reading, buying and generally loitering around the books, they are forming discussion groups, listening to music and having club meetings. They play board games, drink coffee, chat with friends.

And I am absolutely certain that lots of them are purchasing great quantities of books and hoarding them in their homes.

Perhaps we could form a 12-step program and meet every week.