This is my first time engaging in a Walter Benjamin reading and, to begin, his writing style is beautiful. It lacks pretentiousness while conveying a full-bodied story. What I got from *Illuminations* is a telling of how the value of a book can come in many different ways from the text, as evidenced by the act of collecting. Benjamin describes important information beyond the text, such as “dates, place names, formats, previous owners, bindings and the like: all these details must tell [the collector] something–not as dry, isolated facts, but as a harmonious whole” (63-64). All of these can provide some value for the collector, thus demonstrating that value does not come from any single place. Rather, it is ascribed by the collector themselves.

The creation of meaning by a dialogical relationship between book and author is beautifully stated by Benjamin: “I am not exaggerating when I say that to a true collector the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth” (61). The wording of “rebirth” is important here because it is not the creation of a completely new entity. “Rebirth” is a recreation or reiteration of something that previously existed–thus it is the recreation from the same book. In Benjamin’s writing, the book can not be reborn without the collector. Albeit in a more dramatic and morbid manner, this concept reminds me of an excerpt from an essay written by Jacqueline Rose for the London Review of Books: “After all, if I can’t exist without you, then you have, among other things, the power to kill me”. Both of these writers acknowledge life as perception. For Benjamin, the rebirth of the book is dependent on its’ perception by the collector. In other words, for a book–or a person–to be re-born or alive, then it must be perceived.