Yesterday's post on Doris Lessing, books and the internet has brought me two nice links, kindly sent in by readers. They're both to posts about the love of books. This one is about a second-order love: that of browsing used-book stores. It tells a great story about a search finally fulfilled and has this excellent principle as well:
Besides, if you divide the cost... by 20 years, they weren't really that expensive.The other post brings together two comments on the fetishistic aspect of real books as opposed to e-books: on the smell and the feel of them, the sense that 'the physical book is half the experience'.
In the same connection, I will confess that when I read a novel I really like, I want it to be mine. Mostly it already is. But that is one reason I prefer not to read borrowed books. By definition these are owned by someone else, but once I've read a novel and liked it, it's as if I've 'mixed my labour' with it and so made it mine; which, of course, it isn't, both because it's already owned and because 'mixing' your labour with something doesn't create a valid title to ownership anyway - or so I have argued. (Thanks: BT / RL.)
Addendum: Chris looks at some empirical evidence on book buying.