Completing our final reading of the semester, I couldn’t help but reflect on the aspect of humanity that exists in the creation and keeping of books. In Walter Benjamin’s reflection of books and the collecting of them in “Unpacking my Library,” he also alludes to the significance of owner to object and how books exist nostalgia and memory. This is described, “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories” (Benjamin 60). By situating the collection in memory, it becomes not a place for accumulation, but rooted in emotional engagement with the past. Though from a scholarly perspective the archive is often revered as a site of self, personal collections extend this ideal to present these collections as a site of self- of the things we love, our fears, the stories we find self in, etc. 

Books have meaning because of the worth we give them. Benjamin shares this by wisely sharing the fate of a book lies with its owner which may give it a new life. Owning books, therefore, is not a passive experience as the significance of books is granted through personal contexts. 

The last time I visited home, I took notice of an old children’s book, The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, residing on the counter of my family home. As my siblings and I are now all adults and there are no grandchildren in the family, I asked my mom why this had been taken out from wherever she stored books. To this, she told me that when she was babysitting a neighbor’s kid for the evening, she had read this book, the copy being an original print from her childhood and the same one that her mom read to her. As I watched guilt play out on her face, she told me the little girl she was watching had asked to keep the book but that she couldn’t part with it. At fifty is my mom often reading The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse? No, but her experience of emotional attachment towards this book and having a sentimentality towards keeping it in her collection illustrates Benjamin’s argument that books gain value through the person who owns them. To most, this book, worn and weathered, probably is worth nothing, but to my mom, that book connects her to her past and, thus, herself. This is the beauty of the “chaos of memories”– though cliche, one book owner trash is a collector’s treasure.

P.S. For anyone wondering, my mom bought the little girl her own copy of The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse to enjoy. Thus, a new collection was born and books live on.