“A Lament for the Bookshelf” – The Globe and Mail

An interesting read! Russel Smith takes a walk down memory lane as he explains what his [paper] books mean. Here is an interesting quote from his article, describing the tumult his books have been through:

“They have been moved from student room to disastrous relationship to shared house to storage locker for 20 years now, and they have not suffered, indeed they have proliferated as they migrated, like a great nomadic herd.”

Another quote, highlighting bookshelves as windows into a person’s history and life–very interesting way to look at the subject of book collections!

“So we lose forever the pleasure known to humanity for 500 years of taking a stroll up and down the aisles of someone else’s brain by perusing their bookshelves. Gone will be the guilty joy of spending a rainy afternoon at a cottage with the remnants of someone else’s childhood: their Nancy Drews, their 1970s National Geographics. Without bookshelves, you will never know the warning signs contained in the e-reader of your handsome date – you will not know for months that he is reading The Secret and Feng Shui for Dummies, even if you stay over. You will never be able to ask, as casually as you can, “Did you like this?” as you pull down, as if fascinated, Patrick Swayze’s autobiography.”