Friday, October 5, 2007
To collect or not to collect, that is the question
There are a lot of people in the world who can buy a book, read it, and toss it away afterwards. To these people, books are disposable and can be treated as such — it's okay to read the book in the bath and accidentally drop it in the water; it's fine to fold the cover all the way back and flatten the spine; and it's perfectly acceptable to use the first few blank pages for scribbling some notes while on the phone.
But that's not me. I think people are either collectors... or they're not. I'm a collector and have been as long as I can remember. To me, reading a book is only part of the enjoyment a book offers, particularly where a long-running series is concerned. I like standing my new book neatly on the shelf alongside others in the same series, in the correct order, knowing that I need to buy several more to complete the set. For me, the process of finding all the books in a series is sometimes more rewarding than reading the individual books themselves. Ask any cat what he enjoys most — the hunt for a mouse, or eating the mouse afterwards — and the cat will say... well, most likely "miaow," and probably with a look of disdain as he walks off with tail held high. But if he could talk like wot humans do, I betcha he'd tell you that the hunt is far more interesting than the meal.
The hunt is even more exciting when you're still at school and have only two quid pocket money each week. Then you can only buy one book a week (they were about one pound ten when I was at school) and that prolongs the hunt and makes it more interesting. As an adult you can simply buy the entire set and be done with it... but where's the fun in that?
Once you have a complete set of, say, ten books in a series or serial, you have something more than just ten individual novels to think about — you can also compare them against each other, consider the overall chronology, analyze the continuity, and so on.
There's also the comfort factor. Each novel in a series allows you to re-acquaint yourself with "old friends" and go on another journey with them, rather than meeting a whole load of new people. To coin a phrase, it's like putting on a favorite sweater.
With an old series written by a long-dead author like Enid Blyton, you have the benefit of knowing exactly how many books you need to collect; on the other hand, with a current, ongoing series it's exciting to wait for the newest arrival to appear on the bookshelves. But in any case, a series of books looks darn good on the shelf with all those uniform spines and titles.
I started collecting Enid Blyton books when I was about eight, and amassed quite a few before I grew out of them. Then I sold them for 5p each at a local secondhand bookstore. After that came my collection of Doctor Who books, the original novelizations of the TV show (which at the time, around 1984, was into its Peter Davison era). Now THAT was a collection to be reckoned with; in the years that I was an avid Whovian, I'd collected every single Who book available at the time, around 110. The new episodes were novelized very quickly, but there was also a long ongoing process of novelizing older episodes — so potentially I had about a third of what was to come. Still, I'd caught up with the writers and was beginning to lose interest. My collection, which by now was spilling off the end of the shelf, had to go — once more for 5p each at the local bookstore. Oh, what a fool I was! Why didn't someone stop me?
After Doctor Who I sought out a new series to collect. Hmm, how about some kind of fantasy setting? I'd read Terry Brooks' Sword of Shannara trilogy and liked it, but wanted something a little lighter and longer-running. I found Piers Anthony's Xanth books, of which there were nine at the time. So I starting collecting those, and to my delight found that the series was continuing to grow; I don't collect them anymore but to date there are about 31 Xanth books.
Wind forward about fifteen years. My collections between age 18-33 consisted mainly of light fantasy, gritty horror and hard sci-fi, peppered with thrillers. All adult stuff, not a children's book in sight. But then came a time in 2004 when, out of the blue, I thought back to my Enid Blyton days...
But I'll save that for another post.
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I must admit that, although colouring-in and scribbles in second-hand books are annoying, I do like to see names and inscriptions. They give me a feeling of the history of the book and its previous owner/s.
Well, I'm another one that is colouring the pictures in the book, purposely (when I was angry at my mom) dropped them into the bath tube, scribbled in some form of notes to my friend so that our teacher will never notice (naughty of me) when I was bought a book for the first time by my mom which is my Goodnight Stories and fairytales of all kinds.
It was okay when I was five, at the time I "disposable" my books. But, when I grew older, my mother started to teach me of how to treasure my own books and to cherish them dearly and some days even creates a library of my own. I'd love to think of my very own library, but to obey all the strict rules of my mother is a hard task.
My mother was a choosy woman, and whenever I want to buy a book, she will ask me to choose not a book with a better looking but the very best of them all. Then, she forbids me (enough strict) to bring my book to school in order to avoid any scratching or scribbling or colouring, but I brought them to school nevertheless without her knowing, perhaps you can call it smuggling. She will scold me hard when I left my book on the floor or on the bed and had the books trodden and folded until they looked like they were "fried" or something.
After a while, I got used to all the "rules and regulations of keeping your book very beautiful". And that's how all my books are all beautiful (did I use the correct phrase). I swelled with pride when at times my friends praised me of my tidy books and how they looked new when I "smuggled" them to school.
Mimsy.
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