Bibliophilia

A columnist in a recent issue of the British Medical Journal described the condition called bibliomania which can be defined as a compulsive urge to acquire books, and quotes from a 19th century poem about it:
"What wild desires, what restless torments seize
The hapless man who feels the book-disease"
I don't think I am or ever have been a bibliomaniac, but I have been and still am a bibliophile, a lover of books. I've spent many happy hours amid the dusty, musty, shelves of old books where an occasional treasure would catch my eye, and I might stand a while reading bits of it to decide whether I cared enough about it to buy it, inhaling all the while the unique smell, the perfume, of legions of old, used books. Often I would be so absorbed in browsing and reading that I would have no idea how much time had passed, emerging sometimes to discover with surprise that afternoon daylight had turned into dusk after sunset on the short Edinburgh winter days. Browsing was more of a way of life in Edinburgh than ever before or since, because that lovely old city had a great many wonderful second-hand book shops. I've browsed in used book shops also in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Sydney, New York, San Francisco, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, in the only substantial used book shop in Adelaide when we lived there, and for the past 40 years, in Ottawa. I've browsed in Geneva, Zurich and Basle, and along the banks of the Seine in Paris where there are rows of large book boxes with hinged lids that open up to disclose more books. The first time I was in Athens in 1953 I was a millionaire in Greek drachmae because the currency had recently been deeply devalued, so I browsed there too and still have the book I bought, a collection of artistic photos of classical Greece. I've always had a limited budget so browsed and read on site far more than I bought; but I still bought a lot, and despite discarding many each time we moved house, the ranks of books expand from year to year, demanding new shelves to accommodate the swelling throng. Probably the number of books reached the zenith in our row house on Waverley Street where there were several book shelves on every floor of our narrow three story home. I never measured the length of the shelves we had in our Waverley Street home but it was at least 8 and may have been 12 metres more than in our next home on Echo Drive, where we had 72 metres of book shelves, every one of them full to overflowing. Each time we moved house I've discarded books, sold some, passed some on to our kids who all love books too; and given others away. A year or two before we left our home on Echo Drive, I donated more than 700 valuable antiquarian books on public health, epidemiology and other aspects of medicine and science to the Roddick rare book room of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. I did this because our Echo Drive home was very vulnerable; we had two break-ins, and I feared that this valuable collection could be vandalized if we had future break-ins. Nowadays I buy books as much as ever but seldom browse in book shops. I've yielded to the seductive appeal of the internet: I buy most of my books on line, because they are usually sold at a steep discount, commonly 30% and if the order exceeds a certain amount, $39 in the case of the main Canadian on line supplier, they rather than I pay postage and handling. At that rate, hard cover books that have just been published cost less than the paperback version that isn't published until a year or two later. I miss the hours of browsing, the odours, the atmosphere of second-hand book shops, and the rare serendipitous find that gave me the indescribable thrill of finding treasure amid the dusty rows of rubbish, but if I stand too long these days I get a backache, and life is too short to spend several hours once in a while browsing. Even without all that browsing, I can't keep pace with all the books I buy, and they would accumulate far more rapidly if I did spend time in book shops - as I know well from experience on the rare occasions when I do venture through the doors to scan the shelves. Maybe I am a bit of a bibliomaniac, because when I've developed an interest in a topic, a theme, a domain of scholarly study, like particle physics or the ancient civilizations of Asia Minor, I've been inclined to buy more than I ever read, then am embarrassed to discover that some are dull, or too specialized for me to understand, and there's no space to stow them on the overcrowded shelves, so out they, or other books, must go. This has become a serious problem in our condominium apartment where bookshelf space is more restricted than ever before. When we downsized to move from our home on Echo Drive I faced the challenge of cutting my books from those that fitted on 72 metres of shelves to 24 metres. What an agonizing task that was! Fortunately all our kids, and our grandchildren too, read and love books, so they willingly took many, but many more remained. There was a market for a few of them although the prices dealers give for old books are derisory; so for most of the surplus books there was no alternative to giving them away. Even now, more than ten years later, I can't remember exactly the fate of some books I have a fancy to reread, and search vainly for them, only to realize that what I seek must have been among the multitudes I no longer possess. But many old friends, a precious few I've had since early childhood, are still with me. Some, like Pride and Prejudice, I've reread so many times that they are falling to pieces. I'm almost afraid to take Winnie the Pooh down from his place on the shelf because the binding has given up the ghost and almost all the pages are loose, would fall out if I didn't keep a strong grip on them. Books like these are part of me, and I won't part with them, not now, not ever.