I am a bibliophiliac. Or is it bibliophile? What’s the difference, I wonder. . .
Yes, this is my confession, and you, the reader, I presume to be the absolver of this petty wrong of infatuation — or at least a worthy, patient listener.

Perhaps I should be ashamed of this affliction — as I am of my Wiki addiction, previously described –  but I have to say that I am most certainly not. I am unabashedly proud, in fact: I’d wear a ribbon or a colorful armband if one existed (and yes, this is a call to arms — no pun intended there — to all creative people to produce such a thing for me and my fellow biblios at the earliest convenience).

I would be content to live out my life in a wood-paneled study or cool, stone library, deprived of all but books. If I were to be sentenced to such a life, I would grin with that child-like contentment that most every little boy sent to his room of toys and playthings exhibits. I would have the upper hand; I would be locked up with all that I desire. I could never be bored in a jail cell of books.

Allow me to explain. It’s not merely that books provide entertainment of some sort, which they of course do. I like to read, true enough; but the real excitement, the greatest ecstasy of bibliophilia, is in the hunt. I am an avid, albeit not unlimited, collector of books. The motivation is not to find the book containing the most profound insight or novel contribution, but the book of the best binding, handsomest inscription, smoothest paper, and most robust and comely type. By virtue of these essentials of book collecting, most modern books are thus excluded from my eye and interest: they are, for the lack of a better word, cheap. For the raisons d’être for any collector are in the beauty of the thing, the elegance of the book itself. It may also happen to be a good read, a classic, a masterpiece of literature — but these considerations are far beyond my criteria. I’d seek out a book of Trotsky’s favorite borscht recipes if it were fair, in the Old-English, aesthetic sense of the word (as in fair maiden, not as in fair and balanced).

Wikipedia (my old friend) puts it this way: “Most bibliomaniacs, then, are compulsive hoarders, identifiable by the fact that the number of unread books in their possession is continually increasing relative to the total number of books they possess and read.” Very true indeed. As a result of our desire to own the most beauteous of books, we often collect many that we will never read — sadly. I have many falling into that category: books that leap into my arms from their shelves in those ancient, dusty book shops that can be found only in the deepest, darkest, morbid urban crannies. I suppose it would be entirely accurate, in fact, to admit that this kind of book collecting indulges in that most hated cliché: judging a book by its cover. It’s a bit inaccurate, I guess, since there are many important factors for a collector lying within the two covers, like the relative handsomeness of the typeface and frontispiece (although they inform me this latter word is obsolete — why I should care what they say, I’ve not been made aware), but the cliché generally holds true, all things considered (they say that this last phrase too is similarly out of common usage, and that I shouldn’t use it; I respectfully reject their forced evisceration of the English language; see entries for lexical pillager, lingual looter, and Strunk & White).

The occasion of the present confession is a timely one. A short prologue might be necessary: I am a visiting fellow this summer at a research institute in whose libraries can be found the remnants of the personal library of Murray Rothbard, the great libertarian polymath. On account of my research, I was reading today my new copy of Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty — a simply superb book — and in a footnote relating to a paragraph in which I was particularly interested there was a reference to a book by Lord Acton. So, entering the library, I found the title and grabbed the decrepit book from off the shelf. As I turned to the page that Rothbard had indicated in his footnote, I was met with scribblings and seemingly random lines in pencil scrawled all across the page, some even extending onto the page before as if connecting paragraphs across normally-uncrossable dimensions. After some squinting and turning of the book, I finally could make out some of the words on the page, barely decipherable by the unaided, non-toddler eye. And then I had the eureka moment — a moment that should have been accompanied by small firecrackers crackling in the sky and salutary musket shots. I realized that I was holding the very copy of Lord Acton’s book that Rothbard himself had owned and used in writing The Ethics of Liberty! If the outward celebration did not occur as I had hoped, I certainly reveled in my own inward bibliophilic festivities, which I suppose now culminate with the typing of this sentence.

The episode caused me to slightly reconsider the book collecting standards I’ve held heretofore. Perhaps in being preoccupied with gilted leather covers and colorful frontispieces (yes, this second usage of the word has elevated what was my minor stylistic skirmish with the Strunk-&-Whiters to all-out lexical war), I ignored the many books of humbler beauty, the books like those containing Rothbard’s grotesque-yet-fascinating scribbled notes. Perhaps I was wrong to overlook these books of historic importance. Perhaps judging a book by its cover (and its frontispiece — A third time! Take that!) is a policy not as rewarding as I once thought.