What with the v. small apartment we’re living in (2 rooms, 48 square metres in total) and the …slight… increase in book buying I managed last years, the physical limits to book collecting have been on my mind lately. There are only so many Billy bookcases we can fit in our living room and S. has put her foot down on getting them in the bedroom as well. I would love to have my old comic book collection over from my parents, but there just isn’t room. It’s getting so bad that I’m judging new books on format as much as on content: paperbacks are okay, trades are doubtful, hardcovers are right out. And no, a Kindle is not an option. It’s vexing.
And I barely got 200-2500 books or so at home (2020 currently admitted to on Librarything), while the two people in the documentary I watched tonight Boekenjagers (bookhunters) each are responsible for collections in the hundreds of thousands of books, even millions. Charles Blockson is the curator of the Afro-American Collection at Temple University in Philadelphia and had been collecting books on Black history for years before he donated them to the university, hoping to gather together the history of a people who for centuries were not allowed to have one, as he puts it. Aaron Lansky was writing a dissertion on Yiddish literature back in the early eighties and by sheer coincidence got started collecting books in Yiddish, saving them from the garbage dump as those elderly Jews who still read Yiddish were slowly starting to die off and their children, who couldn’t read the language themselves, started to get rid of these books that had meant so much to their parents. That ultimately lead to the National Yiddish Book Center, which at the time of the documentary 13 years ago already had some 17 million books.
Now those are collectors, even if they “cheat” a bit by being professional collectors. Anybody who loves books and loves looking for books and buying books can recognise themselves in these two men. I sure did.