Today I woke up early and drove 30 minutes to checkout a used book sale. Normally I only buy one or two books at a time to prevent my bibliophilia from devolving into bibliomania.
This book sale, however, was too tempting to resist. It was organized by a library so I figured there would be a large, diverse selection of books. Also, each book cost only $0.50…
I arrived a few minutes early and there was already a line of 40 or so people standing outside in the falling snow. Some of them held large moving boxes. I remember thinking something like ‘wow, these people must really love books!’
Inside there were both more and less books than expected. One could leisurely walk all the aisles, looking for familiar titles or authors in 20 minutes. One could also spend hours reading the jacket of every book that looked intriguing.
Thankfully I did not see anyone blindly shoveling books into a box, however, quite a few people scanned the books like it was as a timed Olympic event, snatching books as if to stop the clock. One person even had some small device to scan barcodes. I do not know how it works, but I would guess that it was programmed to beep whenever a book above a certain dollar value was scanned. This behavior seems deplorable at first, but on second thought if a 1st edition of The Great Gatsby (worth $100K+) somehow ended up here, it feels like it belongs in the trained hands of a collector or archivist instead of the food-stained hands of your little cousin.
Anyways, the urgency in the room was contagious and I felt like all the good books would be gone if I did not move quickly. I did not have a plan, but as I quickly surveyed the selection four categories of books naturally arose:
- Books I wanted to read
Books I did NOT want to read- Books I had read and did not own
Books I had read and currently owned
Thankfully I did not feel compelled to buy books I already owned or books I did not want to read.
However, I did feel compelled to buy not only the books I wanted to read, but also the books I had read and did not own.
As I struggled to balance my growing stack of books, I started to feel pangs of guilt. That made me curious. Why do I feel this way?
It was easy to tell that I did not feel guilty about buying books I wanted to read; I could hardly wait to get home and start reading them.
What I felt guilty about was buying books I had already read and would never read again. But why did I feel guilty? My home is full of books I will never read again and they are some of my most prized possessions.
The answer I settled on is that I don’t only enjoy reading books, I also enjoy collecting them. I fantasize about having a personal library full of all the books I’ve read. I would exchange a considerable amount of time and money to make that happen. Right or wrong, I do not feel guilty about my dream of having a substantial collection of books I’ll never read again.
However, I do feel guilty about collecting these books in particular because by buying them I am potentially denying someone else the opportunity to read them. These books are not necessarily available for free at their local library. These books certainly aren’t available for $0.50 elsewhere. When books are so affordable it allows someone to buy books on a whim that they would not otherwise purchase; there is no way I would have paid full price for ‘Salvation on Sand Mountain‘ and that would be a tragedy because it unexpectedly became one of my favorite books. It’s not hard to imagine someone buying a book based on the cover (and the extremely reasonable price) and that book changing their life in the way so many books have done for me.
One could argue that I, being a reasonably well-off person, shouldn’t buy any books at a used book sale because I am potentially depriving someone less well off of the opportunity to read that book (assuming it’s not available for free at the library and they don’t have money to spare). This could very well be the case, but you have to draw your line somewhere and this is where I draw mine.
Don’t buy books you’ve already read at a used book sale.
