I recently discovered this cool little used bookstore in my area. And I rediscover that I love being in an actual bookstore as apposed to online book shopping. I love spending an afternoon browsing and reading. But, of course, I'm also buying. And because of super low prices I'm a little worried that I'm buying too much. I am reading a lot, but I'm also visiting the bookstore about once a week. And how hard it is to leave with just one book, right? I currently have about 10 unread books in my little home library (in part from another trip to the shop today). I don't want to get too ahead of myself and create a major reading backlog, but I'm super excited to read everything I've got, almost to the point that I don't know what to read next. Here's the problem: I don't want to stop frequenting this bookstore. I will say I've been reading and enjoying everything I've been reading since this bookstore came into my life. So, how do you buy just one book at a time? This question is being asked in all seriousness. Today I went in looking for a specific book and left with five. What's wrong with me? I should note that my personal library is quite small (under 30 books). I have no problem giving books away when I'm done with them, but there are some I like to revisit and plan to hold onto those ones. But how do you know if you're buying too many books? The obvious answer would be if you're buying more than you can read. Right now my condition is manageable, but I can see how this could get out of hand. Fellow book lovers -- Do you buy too many books?
My house is practically a library. I have book shelves in every room except the kitchen and the bathroom, and several shelves in some rooms. Plus stacks of books here and there. Here's just a few shelves: A corner of the basement This is an old microwave cart in the dining room Here's a stack. These only show a fraction of what I've got. They're filling up my house. A few years ago my book collecting proclivities made me think of a story idea—a poor man who lives in a shack that he can't afford to heat, and he has far too many books, so he stacks them against the walls as insulation.
Same here. I'm actually actively trying to convince my husband to let/help me open a homeschool library. I need a shed or something plus lots of sturdy shelves to get these all somewhere besides in my house (and in hubby's way). Last I counted, i was close to having 1500 books, and that didn't include the many curricula I own. So basically that's just the fiction and I probably have almost as many non-fiction books. A literal library!
My grandmother haunted used bookstores, and took advantage of their trade in policies. Many will take books back, for a store credit.
I rarely buy new books and have been going to used bookstores since I was 11 years old in my search for old Archie digests. Over the years I frequented about three of them. One didn't last out of the 90s. The other kept shifting location all over the city dodging taxes. Sometimes I'd recognize the owner or his workers. His last and final location was huge and the worker was so nice that when she was pulling books, that would be sold online, asked me if I wanted to fill a box for ten bucks and buy in bulk. I bought a huge amount - old zebra horrors, and old 80's Ya series books and with the ya series books I decided to share my new collection and made a website dedicated to that niche. The timing was perfect because that bookstore closed and it never popped up again. The whole block was bought up and turned into an art's center. My most favorite bookstore was the oldest in the city and run by a sweet old lady. It closed due to the Covid lockdowns (no sales, no rent money). This bookstore had been my all-time favorite and most of my books over the years had been bought there. I always got good deals, the owner would always add up the prices and shave off a few dollars - and I loved roaming around in each room (it was a converted house and each room was dedicated to specific sections) and I could spend hours hunting for the perfect read. It was always nice to talk to the owner and fellow readers. There was one guy that came in with his bulldog whom he pushed in a baby stroller. It had a nice homey atmosphere. I miss it. I have about 11 bookshelves - all double stacked. And yes, I overbuy because I haven't read all of them. But when I get the urge to read I can always find something. My dream is to make built-in bookshelves, an actual library!
I think it's good to have a personal library. It's nice to be able to reference a range of books. I spent a few hundred dollars on used books over the summer, and I think that I legitimately satiated myself. I wanted to get a "corpus" together, a sort of curriculum, since I'm trying to make myself somewhat well-read--I have the petit bourgeois obsession with the intellect as a means of transcending the swinish multitude. I now possess reading material for the next decade probably and I don't really want any more books.
I sold a dozen of my career related books; I'm mostly retired; for a nice sum. Then spent a hundred dollars of it in the bookstore on the way home. But the new books are writing related, makes them legitimate!
So, this happened... Um, I just bought a book I had bought two weeks ago without even realizing it. I don't think this has ever happened to me. The trouble with buying books at a faster rate then I'm reading them, I guess. But something inside me must really want to read this book. Twice even. Because of this it's next on my list. If anyone is wondering what the book is, it's Rag by Maryse Meijer. It's a short collection, but I have pretty high expectations now. Hope it's good enough to read twice.
Some time ago it seemed I had one copy per league of Verne's classic. Not sure where they all came from. I had two ceiling-high bookcases, each with their unhappy shelves double-lined and books poked in like Tetris. The house became a miniature acropolis; little Jenga pillars of books stacked as far as the eye could see, which wasn’t very far as it wasn’t a big house, but still… It was whilst I was musing on a third bookcase that the intervention came, GF swiftly and decisively reframing the notion of live-in library. Fortunately, I was already on the way to minimalism and felt relieved once the Marie Kondo-ing of the living space had been completed. I enjoy liquid consumption of books these days; they flow through rather than accumulate. Inspired by a charity shop book containing a news clipping from 1968, I write little well-wishing messages to subsequent readers before circulating onward. Message in a bottle. Wonder where they’ll end up. Anyway, you're not alone!
