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.