A delightful essay by William Gass about his library at home (20,000 volumes and counting). He begins by detailing his time reading as a child, and in the Navy (”whatever readable books were aboard . . . a handful of Hemingway and a pinch of Faulkner”), and in graduate school at Cornell.

I used to have something bordering on an obsession for keeping books in good shape. I still do in special cases, but mostly I feel as Gass does here:

Collectors who do not care for books but only for their rarity prefer them in an unopened, pure and virginal condition, but such volumes have had no life, and now even that one chance has been taken from them, so that, imprisoned by stifling plastic, priced to flatter the vanity of the parvenu who has made its purchase, such a book sits out of the light in a glass-enclosed humidor like wine too old to open, too expensive to enjoy.

Whereas Mister Tatters, who has his economic failure marked on his flyleaf as a character in Dickens might by virtue of the quality, wear and soilage of his hat, cane and coat, has been enriched by a history: sold new in 1932 for $3.95, as used from the Gotham Book Mart in 1947 for 2 bucks, and marked down successively in pencil and then in crayon from 75 to 50, from 35 cents to a quarter during the decades since—owned by two who signed their names, one who added an address in Joliet—until it completed its journey to St. Louis, where it is picked from a barrow or a box at a garage sale or out of a bin in a Goodwill the way I found my copy of George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty in 1982. It survived its adventures as admirably as Odysseus. I am rather free with my books and will let anyone who wants to kiss The Sense of Beauty’s cover in hopes of a bit of good luck in life.

(Via The Search Was the Thing)