I do miss the act of wandering book stores, looking for something new, not unlike or disconnected from looking for a mate. I have joined the online book buying crowd, I am ashamed to allow.

I have a full 10 x 30 storage space valiantly arguing against the Good-bye to All That (a book I knew of thanks again to the Duttons) attitude.

But it has its proponents.

Roger, you seem a man of action, and your house is lovely with a reasonable orderlyness. Please tell when and how you deal with this, it might give me hope and inspiration. But having a dissertation to write, no other projects will exist until that is finished and I have taken a luxurious victory lap. Then I might really be in the mood for a good life sweeping.

I still have a number of budget softcovers from the days of my youth and they do indeed evoke nostalgia. For a while I was proudly using my junior-high print shop rubber stamp here and there within, complete with home address, for wholly unneeded security. I have a few volumes given me by my best friend of those days, Doug Dutton, who wrote amusing inscriptions that sometimes included the business hours of the now-defunct North Hollywood family bookstore.

To slow deterioration of acidic paperbacks, it helps to put them in airtight polyethylene bags or the like. For things that are really valuable, there are treatments possible to neutralize the acids, but I believe they are expensive and uncertain.

And among scourges, let us not forget our little friends the silverfish, worms, and cockroaches. The last do not usually so much eat portions, but nest and excrete their brownish waste on the edges of the pages. Boric acid works well for these pests, laid down in trails that they must trek through. These have to be renewed periodically as they get to agglomerate and no longer stick to the little manders as they must, so that they get back to the nest and poison the lot of them.

A bookish woman, who once visited my collection, had a warm reaction to recognizing many of the editions. Perhaps the cover graphics, size, typeface etc. become connected to the experience of the reading.

I have found it educational how my opinion of a book may completely change after thirty years, reminding me that all is vanity.

God usually deals with collectors, such as myself, by setting mice, fire, floods and other scourges to rid one of beloved baggage. Your post reminds me I must commit to a plan of deaccessioning, for I don’t want to grow old dragging these smoldering totems from place to place.

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