"Bibliophilia is sometimes called bibliomania but should not be confused with the obsessive-compulsive disorder by that name, which involves the excessive accumulation and hoarding of books."
Wikipedia, Book Collecting
For those who may not yet have heard, my parents will be moving to a new smaller place at the end of the summer. For years, by leaving everything in the bedrooms we slept in as teenagers, my brother and I have deferred the hard decisions about keeping (or not) "things we can't live without" and "things we can't live without only after Mom has reminded us again that they exist".
But all that has to end now and we are taking a page from the current administration's playbook and throwing money at the problem, or rather, at a '5 X 10' X 8' storage unit.
My work began today by helping to bring shelving to the storage unit and starting to go through my share of books stored in closets, on shelves, and in boxes in the garage. I've also been organizing my brother's books - sci fi on the desk; text books in a box; historical fiction on the dresser. Tomorrow, I'll read the titles out to him and he'll have the opportunity to decide how interested he is in having the Cliff Notes on Plato's Republic put back in a box and kept behind locked doors, waiting for him to come pick it up. I privately hope (if a blog can be called private) that he is not interested in it, but in the end, I'm not sure it matters. It still has to go into a box and get lugged off to some other non-bedroom location.
A few months ago, I thought the two of us were well-educated collectors. Now I think we're crazies - me for volunteering to do this, him for thinking Robert Jordan worthwhile reading.
and the story hasn't ended yet! Will there be books in heaven? Or perhaps we'll meet our favorite authors [or at least some of them] and will be able to read their minds - their books in their minds, that is
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