Part 1: Accumulation

Book collectors are strange individuals. They will scour the world for that one book they are looking for to complete their collection at the same time they will pass up a bargain of another book because it doesn’t fit their collection. Book collecting isn’t done as a financial investment. I have always contended if you wanted to invest in something the stock market has better returns and more stability than any collectible market.

Book collecting is done for the love of the book. Yes collectors still like to find a bargain or that wonderful find in a used book store but at the same time they will pay what they need to pay in order to obtain a certain copy of a certain book.

This brings us to collecting versus accumulating.

I am guilty, as many book collectors are, of accumulating books randomly and without any purpose to build a library. Collections should have a purpose. If a collection does not have a purpose, be it saving novels printed in yiddish, amassing illuminated texts from 14th century France, or collecting the volumes of the Library of America, collections need to mean something other than being an accumulation of books.

Let’s take a look at accumulation first. When I was younger I would buy books. It didn’t matter the subject though I didn’t tend to purchase mostly history books. Accumulation as a young adult is a given and I could argue a necessity to becoming a collector. As you purchase more books you start to see the vastness of what is out there to read and collect. I started out with history books concentrating on the US Civil War. I bought what I could but never looking for first editions or more rare editions of volumes I had in my stacks. I bought them to read.

Other than the natural propensity to like reading about the US Civil War there was no other reasoning for my purchases. I also read novels, books on science, comics, and pretty much anything else that I fancied at the time.

Fast forward to my late twenties. I started to understand that I had a lot of books. I liked buying them even if I knew I would not get a chance to read all of them. I was bitten by the biblio-bug. But I was not a collector. I had no purpose to my buying or books. My “library” was not a collection nor a library in the strictest sense in the collecting world. I bought and bought. I tended to just buy books because they looked like they would be fun to read if I ever got to them.

My “collection” at best was a mishmash of fiction, nonfiction, reference, and other books not easily classified. The idea of just buying books was exciting and it didn’t matter what kind of book. I had no focus in what I was buying. I was accumulating books just for the sake of having a large number of books. I was focusing on the number not the content of my “collection.”

Looking back I can see some semblance of a collection beginning to evolve out of that unfocused horde of books. Which leads me to argue that accumulating is an essential part of building a focus or purpose of your collection. Without that stage you have no idea what you might end up being interested in to collect. Now I am not saying that it is a mandatory thing. Sometimes collectors find one book that strikes them and they begin collecting from that. However, I needed that primer. And I think my collection now reflects that planetary disk, to borrow a term from astronomy, of subjects coming together into something with purpose and focus.

My accumulating days are in my past but I still find myself slipping back into accumulation mode once in a while, even within my collection which I will discuss later since you can still accumulate within a focused collection. When I find myself slipping I have to sit back and reassess myself. Not, “Why am I collecting?” but more of, “What do I want my collection to reflect?” or “What purpose do I want my collection to fulfill?” and I find that reflecting on questions like that I regain focus and not make purchases that may not fit in with my collection. However, I always reserve the right to go back and still make the purchase because sometimes the addict needs his fix.

Part 2: Collecting will be posted later this week.