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.