Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

I was rummaging (gently) in the books-about-books section this morning, hunting for a few things to send a new customer (Jodi, your books are on the way!) and I came across Sven Birkerts. Or the book that made him known, more precisely: The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. I pulled it off the shelf, wondering how it had fared since publication, if if had become dated. I was working behind the help desk of a new bookstore when it was published in 1994 and I remember the flap it caused, one could say the debate it started. Are books finished, OVER? Is this the END? Isn't an elegy written for something that's DEAD? Well, probably. But there's a lot of life in them yet! My favorite essay in the book is of course "The Paper Chase" about, in part, his time working in a used bookshop. Though I didn't even read this book until very recently. Extremely recently. Okay, okay, this morning. I think I had so many people recommend it to me over the years, and I sold so many copies back then, that I formed an unwarranted antagonism toward the book and determined NOT to read it. This happens to me often, particularly with best-sellers (I have yet to read a single Harry Potter book - I must be the last person in the world to be able to say this). Totally unreasonable cantankerous stubborn contrariness - I'm sure I miss all kinds of great books this way. But, all these years later, I picked up the Birkerts book this morning, idly opened it, and was hooked instantly when I read the following:

"Working in a bookstore affords a matchless sense of the big picture. Through stocking and sorting titles I started to see recurrences, interrelations, and, in time, arcs of connection. ... I wanted to know everything - I thought I could see how all fields were connected. And here was the chance of a lifetime to build up a library. I carted home histories, books of philososphy, editions of the classics, not to mention all of the novels and books of poetry that struck my fancy. I felt the old book sickness beginning to grip me." (pp.60-61)

The book sickness indeed. Like Birkerts, I'm beginning to wonder if my obsession with books will consume so much of my life energy that I will be unable to complete my own life projects - painting, writing my own books. You see, I want it all. Is that possible? Can that be arranged? These are rhetorical questions, of course, which I'm going to have to answer for myself.