Do you salivate over books? Does walking into a library equate entering a realm of the otherworldly? Do bookstores call out to you with a siren song, dragging you over the portal and dumping you unceremoniously in front of the new releases shelf? If so, you, my friend, are a bibliophile. Whether you read books for enjoyment or collect them for investment, you know who you are – a living, breathing book lover.
Taken from “Among the Gently Mad” by Nicholas A. Basbanes: “The first documented use of the word bibliomania in English came in 1750 when Philip Dormer Stanhope, the fourth Earl of Chesterfield and a wily politician with a gift for turning a memorable phrase, sent a haughty letter to his illegitimate son, then away at school, to warn of a consuming diversion that should be avoided like the bubonic plague. ‘Buy good books, and read them,’ the lord advised the impressionable lad, urging him to choose the sanity of substance over what he felt was the senselessness of scarcity; ‘the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads.’
“Several decades would pass before the term came to widespread prominence, and then it was drolly described as a fatal disease.”
I agree in spades, for it is truly a disease. Whenever more than a week has passed since a trip to the library, I start to have book withdrawals. It’s a hideous sight. First my eyes roll back in my head, and then I start to froth at the mouth. If you hold my library card up in front of me and lead me to the door, the symptoms will abate long enough to facilitate the drive to the library, but it must be done quickly or else . . . well, it’s too ugly to share more details.
What gives me comfort in this affliction is to know that I’m not alone. I love to walk between the shelves and observe all the people scanning the spines, burying their noses between pages, and tucking volumes under their arms. It’s like coming to a family reunion, except there aren’t any annoying sticky name tags.
One report stated that by the middle of this century, we as a society would have outgrown the need for bookstores. Everything will be done electronically and books will be old-fashioned and out of date. Bibliophiles of the world, unite! Continue to haunt your libraries and bookstores. Teach your children to love and to value books. Let’s not let the doomsday prophecies of Bookstores Future come to pass.