Whatever You Do, Don’t Collect Books

 

I’ve always liked books, I liked reading science fiction and mystery paperbacks.  I did not want to throw them away, so I put them in boxes.  And I could never throw away my college text books or business books.  These had to be in my bookcase in my home office.  The concept of collecting books never occurred to me, I just kept them.

 

One day about 10 years ago I bought a couple of bargain books at Barnes & Noble, basically mystery novels for $5-$6-$7 each.  I enjoyed them very much and put them in an old bookcase I had.  I then started to search for books of my favorite authors on the net, so I could read their earlier novels causing me to purchase really big bookcases for my books.    So then found out what first editions were and immediately thereafter,  I found out what a wonderful thing signed first editions were forcing me to again purchase  really nice bookcases for my signed first editions.  And the result?  Now my house looks like a library.

 

Here’s the thing, if you collect coins, you can take them out once in a while, look at them for a minute, and then put them away for another year.  If you collect porcelain eggs, you can put them on a shelf and look at how beautiful they are for a couple of seconds every week, if you collect art, you can hang your pictures on the wall and occasionally appreciate them, but if you collect books, you get to spend 4 to 8 hours reading and enjoying each one.  And then 5 years later you could pick up the same book and read it again and it would be like reading it for the first time.  If you’re like me, you won’t remember what it was about 5 years later.  So you get another 4 to 8 hours of enjoyment.

If you are interested in reading some excellent authors, I would recommend:

Robert Crais for detective novels (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Crais)

Nelson DeMille for mysteries (http://www.nelsondemille.net/content/index.asp)

Clive Cussler for adventures (http://www.numa.net/clive_cussler.html)

Peter Hamilton for science fiction (http://www.peterfhamilton.co.uk/)

 And if you are really twisted, check out Jasper Fforde, an English author who writes books that are a combination of Lewis Carroll, Arthur Conan Doyle and Monty Python (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR1KVM6q3kQ).  It is really great stuff.

 

And if you are interested, I would be glad to sell you some of my books.