Re: Book Hoarding
 

You guys have so much discipline.

Re: Book Hoarding
 

If it's a discipline problem, it's not a problem like, say, "one more potato chip." Books are unique, and the next one might be just the aesthetic experience you wanted (or close to it, anyway), or it might contain just the information or idea or conceptual framework you've been looking for. So you need that next book in a way that you don't need the next potato chip (or whatever).

Seriously.

Re: Book Hoarding
 

I was a real mess before I read this passage from Roland Topor's The Tenant.


The bookstalls were as repulsive to him as an endless row of garbage cans. Intellectual ragpickers probed unconcernedly through all the refuse on display, searching for some morsel of spiritual nourishment. When they found it, an expression of animal-like cupidity crossed their faces, and they snatched it up as if some enemy were lying in wait to steal it from them.


It cracked me up. Now I enjoy buying books, but I no longer need to. Ironically, I needed that book.

Re: Book Hoarding
 

Occasionally I have been repulsed by the sight of fellow book shoppers. This has happened most often at library book sales (which I have learned to avoid). Thousands of books and a swarm of people acting like it's Black Friday at Walmart. (Okay, that's a slight exaggeration.)

But when I desire and acquire books, I don't look at myself from the outside. It's an inward experience of thought and perception, and my main outward focus is on the books and their contents. No, I'm too immersed in this for the Topor passage to cure me of my fascination.

Re: Book Hoarding
 

I don't have enough room for many more books, so I try and limit my physical purchases to books I can't get for my Kindle... apart from when it comes to pretty Tartarus editions.

Re: Book Hoarding
 

On a tangential note, I am curious to know if book hunting features prominently in anyone else's dreams? I ask as they have become increasingly common for me in recent years, occurring at a rate of at least a couple times per month, and are likely my most frequent type of 'happy' dream, edging out even the more emotionally resonant 'encountering one's soulmate' sort of dream. These dreams invariably revolve around my browsing at a used bookshop/thrift store/library sale (something I do constantly) and happening upon a number of titles from my wishlist; usually these are books that exist in reality or are near-analogues, but there is a specific kind of disappointment, bordering at times on heartbreak, that results from waking up after one of these dreams realizing the book you were overjoyed at finding is an oneiric invention, a hybrid that has no basis in reality. As I said before, I have such dreams on an almost weekly basis - earlier this year I found myself looking for books in the same dream location so often that it obtained a strange kind of familiarity, able to be recognized both while asleep and in memory upon waking, and I can still recall the place's basic layout even now.

(Upon further reflection, just realized that this situation pretty much absolutely confirms Ligotti's statement that "the less you do, the less you dream about - but the more often, and more intensely, you dream". . .)

Re: Book Hoarding
 

@ChildofOldLeech: That's a nice recurrent dream. Talk about book hunting and dream reminds me of "Vastarien" or "The Medusa", especially the scene at an old bookshop's basement:
"The bookstore at street-level was no more than a messy little closet in comparison to the expansive disorder down below: a cavern of clutter, all heaps and mounds, with bulging tiers of bookshelves laid out according to no easily observable scheme. It was a universe constructed solely of the softly jagged brickwork of books. But if the Medusa was a book, how would he ever find it in this chaos?"

Unfortunately I haven't remembered my dreams for a while, and I buy almost all my books online. Most used bookstores around my area only carry high school literary books.

Book Hoarding
 

Others may relate.
My burg no longer has bookshops.
The majors are gone, though their stock seldom tempted me.
There are no Used bookshops, aside from a chain which shelves dreck.
Remainders, publishers overstock, cookbooks, crafty things.
Options at the public library are equally dismal.
Indeed, the library, which was a wonderful place for decades, strikes me as a sadly fading ghost every time I enter - and I visit twice a week.

My other great obsession, music, gradually ebbed as new trends no longer resonated with me and I ceased buying altogether.
I tell myself that buying books, protecting them, I am doing something akin to stewardship, safe guarding titles that may otherwise be lost.
The real trick, of course, is wisely dispersing the collection before I die.
Fail there, and the books' fate will be entrusted to the ignorant.

Re: Book Hoarding
 

ChildofOldLeech- Strangely I haven't had book shopping dreams yet because I've had many many recurring dreams about finding amazing grotesque plastic toys, finding amazing unknown obscurities in a variety of comic shops across a town of and dreams of online porn hunting. But in each of these I'm usually stalled by obstacles or the objects elude me somehow, I rarely seem to actually get my hands on the prize.


Some of my reading goals, possibly impossible...

- All the Gollancz Masterworks books (even if it's not the actual Gollancz edition) and most of the Gollancz Gateway Omnibus books.
- All the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line and all the books/stories even considered for the line (as with the Gollancz line, I don't mind if it's an edition by a different publisher).
- All Snuggly books and maybe all Chomu?
- All modern Tartarus authors.
- Most of Blackcoat's translations of French books.
- A good lot of Dedalus, but all the anthologies.
- A good lot of Haikasoru and Kurodahan.
- Try a book by each author published by Hippocampus.
- A good chunk of Valancourt's horror/speculative reprints.
- Try a collection by each Word Horde author.
- A good lot of Undertow's books.
- Read every diversity/social group anthology or magazine I can find.
- Get everything I can by Egaeus.
- A ton of small press magazines.

For the fancy hardcover publishers I wont pay that much over the cover price. Most of the Zagava, Ex Occidente and Raphus stuff is out of my price range so I dont have much plans for them.

Re: Book Hoarding
 

This thread has changed my book purchasing habit somewhat. I used to sit around until the books I wanted run out, but I guess the anxiety is getting to me.

Every year I promise myself to read than buy anymore books, yet this year I'm reading less compared to last year and buying even more books! At this point I need to put in red capital letters "THINK OF THE BUDGET!" whenever I go online.