The case for books

I can’t seem to want to break my physical book addiction

I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but books and I have a long history together.

Stacks of books. Racks of books. Shelves filled end to end, stacked top to bottom. Paperbacks in my bag when I travel. Little islands of books on every horizontal surface in my personal space. I own a lot of books, and I read a lot of books. The advent of ebooks and e-readers only fed my reading habit, but collecting physical books has never slowed down.

I’ve been on the hunt for a new bookcase for months. My office was starting to look kind of cluttered as drifts of books collected in the corners of the room, stacked and rowed along the walls, filling baskets that were intended as a stopgap. I hunted for the right bookcase for months, hoping I’d find something inspiring in a resale shop. I even resorted to browsing IKEA.

Nothing. I found nothing of any real quality, no matter where I looked. And I was unwilling to pay the frankly extortionist pricing of a high-end furniture store nearby for something that felt like only a few degrees of fever above IKEA quality.

Ultimately I did what all modern Americans do when faced with a challenge: I bought it off of Amazon.

The bookcase I got is nice. It’s stylish. It matches the whole motif of my space, with woodgrain shelves and backing and black metal stands with angled crossbars. It fights right in with the rest of my office decor, and it was priced at a level I found affordable, or at least acceptable.

Now it stands proudly in the corner, and all those books I had on the floor and in baskets have filled it to nearly full. Meaning that I now have plenty of floor space for more piles of books, sure to come.

Not to over-romanticize it, but there really is something about a physical book. I know that my bread and butter has been ebooks—they are my biggest sellers and always have been. And they are where I have the highest margins, to use some businessy speak. I make more on ebooks than I do on paperbacks, by far. In fact, I could simply stop selling paperbacks altogether and it wouldn’t impact my bottom line all that much.

Relax... I’m never going to do that.

Because I know that, like me, many of you love and respect and yearn for the feel of a book in your hand. You want the smell of it. You want to feel the heft of it. You want to lay it down on the nightstand so it reminds you to read before turning in or place it on the back of the toilet because, dammit, that’s the only place you can get some peace and quiet in this place. I could never take that away from you.

Books are magical for so many reasons, but one of my favorites is that they are a souvenir from a place you visited while you were sitting in your favorite chair or laying in your bed or riding the train to work. They’re the postcard you mailed home while you were exploring a different world. When the adventure is over, you have the book to place as a trophy on your shelf—another one taken down, another beast conquered.

I could never take that away from you. I could never live with myself.

There are arguments out there, trying to make you feel guilty or ashamed for keeping shelves of books, particularly if you never get a chance to read them again. Don’t listen to that kind of boneheaded foolishness. We don’t keep books simply to re-read them someday.

We keep them because they remind us that no matter what the world gets up to, no matter what else is happening, there are places we can always escape to. We have friends between those covers. We fell in love, fought our enemies, rose to victory, recovered from defeat.

You go ahead. You collect all the books you want. Fill as many bookcases as you can.

Books only take up a finite amount of space, but they open up infinite worlds for you to occupy.

If you’re hankering to collect some books for your own shelves, you can find a very fine starter collection at https://kevintumlinson.com/books

A NOTE AT THE END

There’s still a little space in my new bookcase, but I figure I’ll fill that soon enough. I can’t seem to help myself.

The bookcase is so nice, though. I keep catching myself looking at it. And having all those books on display, it makes me want to go browse and read. That’s the other magic in this—the magic of books on display. It’s why we love bookstores and libraries. There’s something about being surrounded by so much wisdom and storytelling. The psychic residue of it all permeates the space. We feel all of that as we wander through.

I’m running out of space for my bookcases. So I may have to start hanging shelves.