Confessions of a Bibliophiliac

Mike Woolson
Aug 24, 2017 · 5 min read

Hey, there are worse addictions.

Compulsive bibliophilia starts early. Watch for the warning signs.

I love books. I love to swim in them like Uncle Scrooge in his money vat. Which may be an outdated reference, but I have it in a book. I have books that are not just really good books, but remind me of where or who I was when I got them. I skew toward picture books, not that I haven’t read a lot of word books (they pretty much insisted when I was in college) but most of my books are books of images of things like comic strips and cartoons, art, history, ephemera and more than a few of what they used to call “dirty pictures,” but they now call “erotica” and it is okay to have right there in your library (on the high shelves since we do have friends with kids).

We have enough coffee table books to make two or three good coffee tables.

I really like being able to say library. Though I’ve always had more tomes than anyone needs it’s only since my wife and I lucked into our charming fixer-upper in tony West Oakland CA that I’ve actually had a library, which is to say all the books are in one room rather than piled throughout the flat. Many belong to my adored spouse (also a bibliophiliac but more reasoned than me). She also fancies picture books but also has more than a few impressive word books on trauma and dissociation and ancient lore and sexuality (without dirty pictures). It’s mostly her books that make it look like smart people live in our house.

Some of my wife’s books, which are big-brain stuff compared to mine.

The library also has the guest bed. It’s funny, when we set up the library we got a futon couch, thinking we’d have a couch that doubled as a guest bed. But then after we folded it out for a guest we were like “wow, it is much more enjoyable to stretch out on this slightly uncomfortable futon than to sit on the markedly uncomfortable futon couch” so we just left it out. More recently we put a proper bed in there and it is sublimely comfortable.

Looking southwest. If you stood in the southwest corner and looked northeast, you’d see more books.

One of my greatest pleasures of an evening is to grab a glass of wine and just pull a pile of books from the shelves and flip through them, randomly or for a while if I get caught up in something. It’s a luddite sort of web surfing I guess, but it brings great comfort to me.

An evening’s browsing. Not unlike putting together the right playlist.

Some of them go back to my childhood. Some are books from my childhood I bought again or finally bought. A great many are books of comics: comic strips, comic books, “graphic novels”, animated cartoons, books about comics and cartoonists and all of that. My dad planted the seeds for that one with a bunch of books that form the core of my library really. I was a little young for some of them and I’m grateful for that. Les Daniels’ Comix, for example, is where I discovered Robert Crumb and the Freak Brothers at the age of 12.

While not the oldest books I’ve kept (I still have a handful of kids’ books), my late father really planted the seeds of my addiction by gifting me these various early-1970s books on comics and cartoons.

I also like books about film, starting with my adolescent sci-fi fixation. I like books of nostalgia, and have a particular nostalgia for nostalgia books from the 1970s, when the whole nostalgia thing started.

Mostly film, and nostalgia books from an era for which I have nostalgia.

I have a great many books of fetish photography, as well as makeup and bodypaint, which are particular fetishes of mine. I used to be quite self-conscious about having this stuff around…the old Batman teevee show and the green babe on Star Trek had an outsize impact on my aesthetic development and I never knew quite what to make of it. Then I moved to San Francisco (when a guy like me could actually afford to do that) and got some perspective on the range of human proclivities and felt better about the whole thing. I ended up doing a lot of bodypaint cheesecake photography, I love when people keep stuff playful and goofy.

More grownup books.

I had always hauled books around with me, from a milk crate or two in college, to a shelf or so as I bounced between apartments…it became a bookcase probably around 1990 when I was in grad school. The collection began to expand laterally during the fifteen years I had a little rent control flat in SF until I had, by any measure, an awful lot of books.

Attempts to get our animals to share in my fascination have to date proved fruitless.

As noted I fell in love with a woman who also had a lot of books…fewer than me by a factor of four, though, so out of basic human decency I purged a great many when we moved in together. Mostly fiction or other word books that I had no sentimental attachment to and figured I could find again if I wanted. The remaining Very Many Books had sentimental attachment, or were books that would be hard and/or pricey to replace. Sometimes I go through and try to find ones to pull and make space, but it’s embarrassingly difficult. And since people know I am a book fiend, I often have friends give me books they are getting rid of…which is sort of like buying a rummie a drink, but I am not complaining.

How many books is too many books? This composite from a few years ago might hint at an answer. There’s more now.

I’m not sure how many books we have now. Somewhere north of 2,000 based on my estimate of 50 per 30-inch shelf. More than the room can fit, and many are downstairs till I remodel the attic or invent a tessaract. And it’s a ballpark metric: for example, my 37 volumes of The Complete Prince Valiant take up only slightly more shelf space than the three-volume Complete Calvin and Hobbes. Anyway, it’s an Awful Lot of Books.

Books per lateral foot is a notoriously tricky thing to estimate.

So I am going to be writing about those books here. Not right now because my wife has a cold and just fell asleep in the library. But I’ll do more soon. I’m just glad I finally got my damn blog started.

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