I have loved books since I can remember, and since I was a teenager, I’ve had a personal library. It was just a few mass-market paperbacks then, but I can still see them on the shelves that separated my desk from my brother’s in the room we grew up in. Very gradually, as the years went by, I accumulated more books. I remember filling the two tiny shelves of my room in the dorm the year before my mission, having hauled them up there in a trunk. I didn’t make that mistake again, and as the years went by, and I moved repeatedly, I became an expert at boxing and moving my books, which now number in the thousands.
With the recent moves from Minneapolis to Salt Lake City and now from SLC down to American Fork, coupled with my advancing age, the burden of carrying all these books around with me has become just that; a burden. And now that we can purchase devices that can store “up to 3,500 books”, a capacity that will no doubt rapidly increase, there are alternatives to the traditional physical book. Faced with the certainty of moving them all again in 18 months when I will be even more decrepit than I am now, I have, for the first time in my life, begun to question keeping a library.
Just a few of them
On the other hand, the need for a personal library recently has become glaringly apparent as I have needed books for research that are unavailable in local libraries or bookstores. And, since I am at the bottom of my finances, I can no longer afford to purchase them even when they are available in a store, brick and mortar or online. This makes the book download, which is less expensive than a physical book, increasingly attractive.
But, there are so many things about books that I love, I find it hard to believe that I will ever be able to do without them. As John Updike put it:
a book is beautiful in its relation to the human hand, to the human eye, to the human brain, and to the human spirit.
There are far worse things to love.
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