Week 13: Joy in My Messy Book Collection

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In “Unpacking My Library,” Walter Benjamin reflects on the emotional and almost intimate relationship collectors have with their books. He explains that the true value of a collection lies not in reading the books but in the personal history surrounding them. As he writes, “every passion borders on the chaotic” and the passion of a book collector is marked by fond memory and affection more than utility or practicality (60). This idea resonates deeply with the way I relate to my own small but growing collection.

Like Benjamin, I don’t always acquire books because I intend to read them right away. Instead, I often pick one up because I’ve either heard great reviews, it’s been gifted to me, or simply because I liked the way the cover looked. Benjamin writes that collectors often have a relationship with books that is more about the story of acquisition than the text itself. He writes  “the thrill of acquisition” in collecting becomes a central feeling, as each book carries a unique experience and relationship between the book and its owner (60).

This is exactly how my own collection works. I store books away on a shelf, thinking that I’ll get to them later, and then I completely forget about them until I clean my room. When I rediscover them, I feel a sudden sense of joy not just because I’m finally about to read them, but because each book reminds me of where it came from. My books hold memories of past moments, people, and places. The joy I feel from stumbling upon my books relates to Benjamin’s argument that collections are biographies in object form. The books gifted to me especially hold emotional sentiment. Their value is not connected to the words on the page but rather to the person who gave them to me. My personal experience of book collecting is similar to Benjamin’s notion that a collection is an archive of one’s memories serving as a personal narrative or timeline. My shelves might be messy, and I haven’t read a lot of the books I own, but their value comes from what I experience in life.

Bookishness

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This week we read Professor Pressman’s Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age Intro and Chapter 1 and honestly, very fascinating and intriguing. I know we have discussed bookishness in class before but I feel as though this introduction and first chapter made me understand it even more and honestly, I see myself as a bookishness person and I never realized it and I also never realized how much we truly do fetish this object. I also never realized that our deep love for books also change how we craft the book like its physical aspect which is what professor Pressman talks about in her work. “Bookishness affects literature not only at the level of content and story, but also in form and format.”(Pressman 22). This sentence made me remember about our times in special collections where we would see a lot of great books that didn’t really LOOK like books. We saw how someone made a story with a can, as well as a copy of Dracula no more than maybe half an inch big and wide as well as a constellation book that folded into pyramids which are 3D shapes. We as a society love this object so much that we are willing to break the rules of how a book should be created physical as well as written “appropriately” because changing the formatting and format of a books content is a huge deal and is something that should not be overlooked at all. Content is important, but we must ask ourselves as to why our author created this book the way they wanted and why did they decide to format the content into weird formats. Format and formatting is something that has interested me from the start of class because I have read countless books where authors tend to let their creativity run loose with formatting. I always found it “unformal” as a child when I read books with those formats and I often labeled them as books not worth reading since they became silly in my eyes. Seeing it now though, its creative liberty and freedom of expression which I think is beautiful and something that should not be overlooked which is ironic considering its a physical aspect in which you are constantly looking at when reading.

Looking back at my life, I remember reading pop-up books, but never really asked myself as to why it was created that way or rather; how someone was obsessed with books so much that they wanted to literally bring it to life. Books are great and seeing how humanity is obsessed with them(me too) I cant wait to see what people are going to share later down the line!

Unpacking the Bookishness

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Dr. Pressman’s book Bookishness and Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting” both contemplate and ruminate on the value of possessing books. While Dr. Pressman’s work isn’t purely based on book collecting, she does write [following her quote of Bonnie Mak on books attesting to the character of owners] “The bookshelves serve as evidence that the noble pursuit of knowledge can offer an alternative to a noble birth,” (Pressman, 34). This is indicative of a person self-representing themselves based on the collection of books they own in their own personal library. In today’s literary culture which has moved from the physical aspect of unpacking libraries to digitizing them, the virtual bookshelf is even greater than the physical one that Benjamin wrote almost a century ago.

Benjamin writes, “To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves” (Benjamin, 64). The 20th century perspective of unpacking a library has changed dramatically. Where Benjamin finds chaos in the reorganization of books is also where he finds peace. He purposefully proposes a physical intimacy with the books that he owns which only increases the value to him. This library that he unpacks is difficult to imagine today. Like Dr. Pressman discusses with the virtual bookshelf in Bookishness which “displays books with their covers, rather than spines, facing outward” and that it “reminds us that old and new media operate in complex loops of recursive influence rather than a linear ‘this will kill that’ model” (37) there is a certain kind of privilege that comes with physically owning books or the digitized versions we have permission to access. Book collection has changed in so many ways yet the principal of ownership remains unphased.

Nearness – Staying Close to Books in a Digital World

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“Bookishness is about maintaining a nearness to books.” (p. 10) Nearness. There’s something quiet but powerful in the way Pressman uses that phrase. She isn’t talking about how much we read or how deeply we understand a text. She is talking about something simpler. Being close to books, keeping them around us, letting them shape the spaces we live in. And that idea immediately made me think about why books still matter in a world where so much has moved to screens.

For Pressman, this physical closeness becomes a kind of language. The book doesn’t need to be opened to speak, it communicates simply by being there. A shelf full of novels, a stack on a nightstand, even a single book placed on a desk can create a certain atmosphere. It changes how a room feels. It changes how we feel in the room. Nearness becomes emotional. It suggests comfort, stability, or even a small sense of grounding in a digital world that is constantly shifting and moving. But Pressman pushes this idea even further. She reminds us that bookishness isn’t only about what we surround ourselves with, it’s also about who we become through it. “‘Bookishness’ comes from ‘bookish,’ a word used to describe a person who reads a lot (perhaps too much). When coupled with ‘-ness,’ the term takes on a subtle new valence.” (p. 10) Suddenly bookishness is not an action but a state of being. It becomes part of how we present ourselves, how we are read by others and how we imagine our own identity.

And I see this everywhere. Books on shelves in the background of Zoom calls. So-called “shelfies” on social media. Pinterest boards full of libraries people will never visit, saved simply because of the aesthetic. It’s all an attempt to stay close to books, even when the books themselves have become partly digital and partly symbolic. Nearness moves from the physical world into the online one and the objects we keep or the images we share still say something about us. What I find interesting is how natural this feels. We don’t usually think about why a room looks different when it has books in it. We don’t question why a shelf can make a space feel warmer or more personal. But Pressman makes visible something we usually take for granted. Books shape the environments we build and the selves we project. To be “bookish” today doesn’t mean reading all day. It means choosing to stay close to the idea of the book. Its presence, its weight, its quiet promise of time and attention.

In a world where everything is fast and fleeting, nearness becomes its own kind of resistance. It’s a small way of holding on to something steady. And maybe that’s why bookishness feels so relevant now. Not because we are reading more, but because we still want our lives to feel like there’s space for books in them.

Collecting as a Way of Remembering

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When I read Walter Benjamin’s Unpacking My Library, one line really stayed with me. He writes, “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.” (p.60) I read that twice. It felt so true. Collecting isn’t just about owning things it’s about holding on to moments that meant something once.

Benjamin talks about how his shelves look messy but how that mess has its own kind of order. I love that idea. It reminds me that memory doesn’t work in straight lines either. It’s full of little pieces that somehow belong together, even if they don’t make sense to anyone else. Maybe that’s what a collection really is, a space where all those pieces can live side by side.

When I think about my own things, I realize I do the same. My computer is full of old photos, half-written notes, and random screenshots I can’t bring myself to delete. They might not look important, but every one of them connects to a moment I don’t want to forget. It’s a kind of digital version of Benjamin’s bookshelf, just with files instead of books.

What I like most about Benjamin’s thought is that he doesn’t see disorder as something bad. Sometimes chaos just means that something is alive. Maybe that’s what collecting really is a way of keeping our memories close, even when we don’t know exactly why.

Forms of the Book and The Mind of the Reader

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Over time, in our class discussions, I’ve come to realize that the nature of the book isn’t so much linear as it is cyclical. The history of the book works similarly, operating cyclically, and affecting society, thereby causing remediation that we may sometimes mistake for “new”. However, in reality, many of the digital fears we have now, for example, AI today, were also shared by people in the past. “In the years leading up to the new millennium, fears of the digital were articulated as threats to the book.”(Pressman 26). Professor Pressman mentions how the book wasn’t always the thing threatened for obsolescence but in fact the catalyst of fear and change:

“In a pivotal scene in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), set in fifteenth-century Paris during the emergence of the printing press, Victor Hugo poses the archdeacon Claude Frollo, the narrative embodiment of the Catholic Church, alongside a book and a view of Notre Dame: ‘The archdeacon gazed at the gigantic edifice for some time in silence, then extending his right hand, with a sigh, towards the printed book which lay open on the table, and his left towards Notre-Dame, and turning a sad glance from the book to the church,—‘Alas,’ he said, ‘this will kill that.’ ’1
The statement ‘this will kill that’ expresses a belief that new media (here, the book) will
destroy older, established forms of knowledge production and distribution (here, the church).”(27)

This fear of the new destroying the old is not new, especially when it comes to The Book. The church, back then, had an incredible amount of power and influence in the world. It feels as though the expansion of information and the book itself were seen as potential catalysts for the church’s downfall in terms of stripping its power that it had on people. For now, the information and potential influence weren’t limited through the mouth of the church or kings who were likely loyal to the church as well.

Today, books now come in various formats, to the point where you can buy a version of a book that’s being read to you. AI now has the capabilities of writing fiction if prompted to, and mimicking the way we write. We have now, more than ever, become a society that relies on technology for many things, and that is not limited to literature as well. But it is the forms that the book takes that can illuminate perhaps what we, as a society, are now utilizing, prioritizing, and finding comfort in. But a paradox forms in that it is this exact shift that creates reactions to preserve and continue to nurture the book into the Digital Age.

Revisiting My Fascination with the Book

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This week’s readings, especially Bookishness have forced me, in many ways, to return to the very first blog post of the semester in which described my own relationship to the book. Books and bookshelves have long been a staple in my life, and I have lugged around the same collection of books from apartment to apartment to house to house and in six or so moves left and right across the country. I feel very much like the collector in Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking my Library.” I’ve been collecting first editions and rare books for a long time, and I’ve come to them in myriad ways. Often, it is books that somehow, bafflingly, garner “no interest, no bid, and the book was put aside,” but unlike Benjamin’s protagonist, I did not wait but leapt at the opportunity to find a book “in the secondhand department and [benefit] from the lack of interest” (65). I once found a 1929 first edition copy of A Farewell to Arms in an antique store for $12. On the free books shelf in the lounge in the Arts and Letters building I have found, rather recently, a first edition, dust jacketed copy of The Things They Carried, a first edition of Anthony Swofford’s memoir Jarhead, and a few weeks ago in a thrift store in Idaho I found a signed (!!) first edition copy of Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land for four bucks.

These things carry immense value to me beyond the monetary. In large part, this is due to the culture of bookishness and the time I was brought up in. For much of my adolescence the conversation surrounding print’s impending death was very loud and very present: “A history of normative values associated with literary media … transferred to a new site of conflict: print versus digital” (Pressman 16). As a young boy you naturally must choose a side in any argument or debate or conflict, and so I chose print. In the midst of this conversation, it is important to note that I grew up extremely rural and had dial-up internet until 2012, which very likely swayed things for my mother and I, making it impossible to quickly download files, play games online, watch YouTube, etc. We did not even get cell service at the house. You had to walk up to the top of the hill for to get bar or two.

Regardless, I became a staunch supporter of printed media. I begged my mother for a Sports Illustrated subscription in the misguided belief that I could be the one to stave off the demise of the printed magazine. “If they don’t print it, and only post it online, how will I read?” I remember lamenting.

“The history of the book is about power and politics,” as Dr Pressman writes in chapter one of Bookishness (33). And, at the time, only the powerful and the well-off and the urban could afford the kind of all-the-time connectivity we saw have such a rapid uptick in the aughts and 2010s. I was none of those, and so for me, printed media became a thing that I consumed because I was poor, because we could not afford then the fancy newfangled things that people were claiming would upend the world order. It is interesting that this has now flipped on its head, that many of the poorest in this nation and around the world have access to internet and the technologies that were once unobtainable. That now, following the “death” many in the news once warned us of, print is doing just fine. It is not the same as it was, and many magazines and publishing houses have shuttered, but there is still a market for these things I once feared would become obsolete.

Through all this, I have held on to these books (and added many more), though their meaning has changed over the years, and, like Banjamin’s protagonist, these books have come to me by many avenues. There is a level of intellectual projection done by them. The crowd I often find myself surrounded by is frequently shocked that I read at all, let alone that I am a writer. There are memories in them. Many were passed down from my mother, who stole them from the LD Bell High School library in 1979. Her name is still on the card on the frontispiece. They have been gifts from friends, colleagues, family members. I have found them on the street. I have spent amounts I wouldn’t like to disclose on a few of them. I have stolen others from friends’ libraries. I have written some of them. My friends and my teachers have written others. I have come to them or they to me in many ways, but what is central is that these books remind me of a world into which I was born and which now seems as if it hardly exists at all.

The digital age has completed its ascent, and I latch on to the book out of nostalgia, familiarity, or fear. There is something comforting in looking at their many-colored spines as I write this. I could not have that same comfort on a device, no matter how they rearranged the front screen of the Books app. All of these varied feelings simply cannot be applied to a phone, to a screen, something that when we buy it, we know will someday soon become obsolete, because what the digital grants us in access it strips from us in permanence.

Will my grandchildren one day fire up my laptop and go through my files, watch some of the movies I have downloaded, play some of the computer games? Hell no. Let’s not lie to ourselves. But I do like to believe, if only because I have done it, that one day they might lift a book out from the shelf that was once in their grandfather’s collection, and open it and find his name and turn the same pages that my hands have turned. There is some kind of immortality in that, no?

The Thrill of Owning

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The idea of collecting books in a personal library without reading them, just for the thrill of having it, paints books in a new light as objects instead of content to be read. According to Walter Benjamin in his book Illuminations it’s not about the books at all, it is about the thrill of acquiring them and the feeling of owning them. It always comes down to ownership and power. People feel powerful and more intelligent if they have many books in their possession. It’s the feeling of looking around in your gallery knowing that they are all yours even though most of the books sit unread, for example, “to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, ‘And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?’ “Not one tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sévres china everyday?(Benjamin, 62)” This quote places books in the same category as fancy china that sits in a cabinet, only to be used for special occasions, or never at all. This is powerful because it argues that books are merely material objects to be collected. This deeply corresponds with the idea of bookishness and shows books to be material items, separating them from what they hold inside.
I remember the first day of class many classmates spoke of their book collections and how they hadn’t even read most of them, and I related to that. We collect books for the feel, smell, touch, look, and physicality. The thrill of acquiring. The feeling of power from owning them. This is all very human of us, our hunting and gathering nature. I strongly believe humans will never stop collecting books, even in a fully digital age. Books will always be a collectors item, an object, separate from its content. Humans love books as objects, even if we don’t even use them to get our knowledge. 

May Books never leave us

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In her work “Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age,” Jessica Pressman describes a fascinating paradox. We live in a time when we no longer need books, but love them more than ever. Although the traditional physical book is far outdated as a reading technology, we are surrounded by a new culture of book worship. Pressman calls this phenomenon bookishness: “creative acts that engage the physicality of the book within a digital culture.”

This phenomenon can be found everywhere: book sculptures, cell phone cases that look like old books, in so-called “shelfies” on social media, or in laptop bags with a leather book look. The aesthetic appearance, especially of old books, fascinates many people. It is more than just pure nostalgia. It is a cultural response to the loss of closeness, materiality, and identity in the digital world. While we find ourselves in an era of constant connectivity, we longingly seek the concentration, privacy, and tranquility that we find in books. Pressman writes: “The book has historically symbolized privacy, leisure, individualism, knowledge, and power. This means that the book has been the emblem for the very experiences that must be renegotiated in a digital era.” Books have become symbols, physical markers of identity. Pressman describes how people today use books (or images of them) to show belonging and taste, for example through bookshelves as Instagram stories or in the background as decoration in cafés or in their own homes. The possession, or even just the display, of books becomes a gesture. It is proof of cultural depth, education, perhaps even resistance to superficiality.

The work emphasizes that this love of books is not backward-looking, but productive. Bookishness transforms books into art, design, or performance. When artists cut, fold, or digitally recreate books, they make it clear that books live on, not as a medium for reading, but as a medium for thinking and feeling. We also saw this in the interview between Jessica Pressman and Doug Beube and Brian Dettmer, who use books as art to convey a certain criticism of a particular medium. In the end, bookishness is not a nostalgic retreat, but a new form of engagement with the digital. She writes: “Loving books in a digital age is personal and communal… claiming a bookish identity can constitute an act of rebellion.” We love books not because they are useful, but because they no longer have to be. 

Week 13: Books to Read or Collect

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When does a book reader become a book collector? Most who read, who pursue reading as a hobby, will borrow, or buy, and own books. They will have a bookshelf or bookshelf’s to display and keep their books, bit are they collectors of them or just owners? While reading Unpacking My Library, by Walter Benjamin, I became interested in the process by which someone becomes a collector of books rather than simply a reader of them. Through the reading I figure that the collection of books, not only the ownership of them, is intentionally, one has to state that they are a collector of books in order to be one.

If a reader has a large number if books in their library it is not a collection until they deem it one, until they do it is a group, library, or an assembly, not an intentional collection. To collect books is to appreciate them and see them beyond the material they hold, but as Benjamin describes, to love them as , “the scene, the stage, of their fate.” (Benjamin, 60). There is a difference between a person who says that they love reading and books and a person who says they love books and owning them, one is a reader, one is a collector. A person who reads may be a collector, but there is not always a certainty that a collector is a reader.

I have realized that I am teetering on the verge of becoming a collector of books, not just a reader of them. I used to only buy books if I intended to read them immediately, as a reader I have had rules for my shelves, just as he had ruled that “no book was allowed to enter [them] without the certification that [he] had not read it.” (62). But the rules I have for my book ownership are changing, I now have begun to buy multiple editions of the same book, or have bought books that I will read “one day,” even if a planned date for reading is non-existent. I want to have books not just to read, but because I like having books, I am becoming a collector, my library of books is now a collection of chosen books, not just an assemblage of literary devices.