In the chapter “Unpacking My Library, Walter Benjamin indirectly displays books as a commodity, and as it has been discussed in this class plenty, an object to fetishize. As Benjamin unpacks his library, he gives the reader “insight into the relationship of a book collector and his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection” (pg. 59) by recalling the various methods of collecting books and the mental or emotional loops one experiences during these acquisitions. Some of these methods of acquisition mentioned are writing books yourself, going to auctions, and buying from bookshops. 

In this excerpt, Benjamin spends a considerable amount of time talking about the method of getting a book through an auction, and how this method not only requires recognizing the quality or provenance of the book, but also being aware of one’s competitors who will keep “raising his bid – more to assert himself than to acquire the book” (pg. 64). In Benjamin’s lamentation of the auction’s fierce and prideful atmosphere, it is obvious how books have been marked as objects of fetishization and serve as an outward projection of a persona which is explored in Dr. Pressman’s Bookishness. As Dr. Pressman discusses how “bookshelves as a means of self- fashioning and self- representation” through “judging people by the covers of their books” (pg 34) in the context of physical codices and the rise of the digital page, it’s not thoroughly explored how the cost books also contributes to self-representation, as much as it is explored in “Unpacking My Library.” In Benjamin’s excerpt, the cost of the book and how it’s acquired is practically the focus. This act of finding a book, whether that be through auctions, going to bookshops, or travelling around the world as Benjamin has done, becomes less about the book and more about the wealth needed to acquire the book and the stories about retrieving the book. Though Benjamin ends up buying Fragmente aus dem Nachlass eines jungen Physikers at a secondhand shop, what makes the story riveting is that he was at an auction where he had been outbid, and then learned how to wield a lack of interest in these spaces to get what he wanted. The interesting part is less the book and more the story of getting the book.

The conversation of bookishness is constantly being furthered as the semester progresses, showing me how every aspect of a book and outside of a book can be part of fetishization. It also reminds me that plenty of objects have not gone unfetishized, as “every passion borders on the chaotic” (Benjamin, 60) and is a part of an obsession, whether we acknowledge it or not.