Addict

The day was June 10, 2006. The place – the civic center in Abilene, Texas. Almost as soon as my hand brushed the spine of the first book on the first table, I was overwhelmed by a sense of calming bliss. Surrounded by hundreds of thousands of paperback romances, classic leather-bound tomes, college textbooks, encyclopedia collections, illustrated children’s stories, dog-eared short-story anthologies and everything in between, I suddenly got the feeling all was right with the world. I forgot where I was, what I was worrying about and what I was supposed to do next as I lost myself in the flyleaves and back-cover summaries of any book that looked even remotely interesting. I absorbed the chattering, shrieking, and running amok of various unsupervised children with a degree of detached tolerance. I even smiled at a drooling, whining toddler in a stroller.

To appreciate how amazing this is, you need to understand my normal reaction when forced to remain within earshot of a screaming child. My shoulders hunch up toward my ears and my spinal cord starts to shrivel, curling toward the base of my brain for protection. My blood pressure and temperature rise, my eyebrows scrunch together in a scowl and the hair on the back of my neck stands up as I mutter, “I am never having children.” I shudder visibly with each successive wail, hoping one of us will finish up and leave before my ears fold in on themselves in defense. Except on this day, in this location, surrounded by tables and tables of cheap, mostly-new stacks of glorious books. You could have latched a wailing infant to my right arm and a cranky toddler to my left leg and as long as I had an hand free to flip open a book, it would not have phased me at all. I’m not even that chill after a Valium (which I’ve only tried once) or a couple glasses of wine (which I continue to try, regardless of my success).

The weirdness of this fact is not lost on me, I assure you.

I started worrying the day I discovered LibraryThing.com, a website that allows the motivated bibliophile to catalog their treasures by ISBN, Library of Congress Call No., or even enter the info manually. You can categorize, tag, search, reorganize and index by author, subject, review, rating, date or whatever. You can even see who else owns, likes, dislikes or reviewed your books. You can compare your library to others’, cross referencing titles weighted by library size. It’s actually kind of sick if you think about it. Not only did I sign up and pay the requisite $10/yr fee (lifetime membership is a bargain at $25, but I have commitment issues), I also bought a little keypad to plug into my laptop to speed up the process of typing in all those 10-digit ISBNs. I finished after approximately 5 days of stepping around 3-foot-high stacks of books, and noted with dismay the total was a dismal 614, and that’s not counting the two cartons still sitting uncatalogued in my dining room.

I at least have the sense to understand the depth and breadth of my pathology when it comes to books (not to mention the OCD involved with the keypad thing, but that’s another entry for another time). Since I first began to read at four years old, books have been my solace, my escape, my joy and my stimulation. They have broadened my horizons and challenged my assumptions. They provide common ground for conversations with strangers, hours of cheap entertainment, and not incidentally, a little intellectual ambience to my otherwise boring living room.

The rest of the year I generally do pretty well at controlling the perpetual impulse to add to my already overflowing collection. I toss out the Borders coupons, keep my eyes straight ahead as I pass Books-a-Million and make my visits to Barnes and Noble as few and far between as possible. But on one Saturday every June I’m lured by the siren song of Friends of the Library sale’s cheap literary goodness, and every July I spend hours cataloging the fruit of my ill-gotten gains.

Today is May 5; the event is still over thirty days away and I still have a box of unpacked books from last year’s sale. The way I see it, I have two choices; I can either buy another bookshelf in preparation for this year’s spree or I can move.

I’m really going to miss my friends here.