“What you really collect is always yourself.” —Jean Baudrillard
I have collected books for nearly my entire life. One of my earliest memories is being magnetically drawn to the book as an object. The battered copies of The Chronicles of Narnia that my father read to us at bedtime held power as individual volumes, to be sure—but when slotted together in their worn cardboard case, they became one of the most magical items in the fantastic landscape of my childhood world. I would walk by the shelf and touch them, reverently.
Later, when I discovered Brian Jacques’ Redwall series, and took deep pleasure from the way those intricate spines looked lined up together, the collector in me was born.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: I don’t believe you have to read every book you own. You don’t even have to read most of them. That might sound like heresy in certain circles—like admitting you drink wine but can’t taste the terroir. But for me, collecting books is not just about consumption. It’s about creation.
I’ve never read Arabian Nights, and who knows—maybe I never will. But I own a three-quarter cream-colored vellum-bound set, published by Charles Knight and Co. of Ludgate Street, London, in 1839. It sits proudly in my living room and gives me a deep and daily joy. I also still have the paperback copy of Where the Red Fern Grows that I bought at the Scholastic Book Fair in third grade, and in the nightmare case of a fire from which I must flee, that worn paperback would be snagged from the shelf on the way out. It is irreplaceable.
It is a joyous phenomenon, the building of a personal library. From the thrill at the sight of a worn spine in a secondhand shop to the belief that a stack of books on the floor is a design choice, not a mess. The intention of the collector, the agency exercised, makes those books a statement about the person who chose them. For the collector, books are always tools for learning, but they are also objects of aesthetic, emotional, and even spiritual value.
And yes—let’s say it—luxury.
In a world of minimalism and digital everything, the presence of books in a home is a quiet (or not-so-quiet) rebellion. It says: I believe in paper. I believe in slowness. I believe in—and here I reveal the title of my never-finished, always-in-progress collector’s memoir—The Physical Weight of Thought.
Whether you’ve read the book is not the only thing that matters. Just having it there, in reach, means you could. It’s potential incarnate. Our stacks are not a mess, sir—they are altars to curiosity, soft explorations of nostalgia, gorgeous reaches toward identity. Often all three.
Call it a micro-luxury. Like the perfect pen. A well-worn leather bag. A candle that smells like an old forest. The library you build around yourself—intentionally or accidentally—is a reflection not just of what you’ve read, but of how you see yourself, or how you’d like to, or how you once did. Of what you’re drawn to, even if you’re not always sure why.
And here’s the secret: that act of curation? That’s creative. For god’s sake, don’t stop reading; we would need a thousand and one articles to even touch upon the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual benefits. But just as an artist selects a palette, or a poet edits a line break, a collector makes choices that shape something meaningful. A library—or a single shelf—can be a self-portrait. One that looks backward and forward at once: at who we’ve been, who we hoped to be, what we became, and what we still might be.
You don’t have to justify it. You don’t need to finish every novel or crack every spine. The books you collect are more than their content—they’re extensions of your interior life. And that, in its own quiet way, is art.
So don’t fret the next time you pick up a book and think, Oh, but I have so many. You contain multitudes. And that is a miraculous and mysterious idea to represent. Book collecting is a beautiful way of trying.
