Why do we collect books? For reading, obviously, but sometimes also to compensate for a sense of intellectual inferiority. There is strength in numbers; quantity uplifts, at least until someone pops that balloon by asking how many of them you’ve actually read.
Back in Poland, as a journalist, I was around well-educated people, and although no one ever asked me about it, my HNC equivalent was no match for their masters and PhDs. It may sound silly, but it was a well-hidden thorn in my soul, especially since I could only blame myself—switching between universities, moving from one field of study to another to complete nothing in the end—pure me. Of course, not all of this madness was in vain. Like a true Renaissance man, I could hold a conversation with almost anyone, and this helped me a lot in my journalistic work. But despite this, I couldn’t shake the feeling of inferiority of a provincial boy that I was.
And this is where obsessive collecting came to the rescue. It took me many years, but I had acquired quite a large collection of books, and I was proud to see the admiration on the guests’ faces as they looked around the room that looked more like a library than a living room. It wasn’t like rich people bought entire collections of books just for decorative purposes. I actually read at least some of the books I had. Besides, a large part of my collection consisted of various dictionaries and encyclopaedias—there were no smartphones back then and the Internet was still a novelty—which I used for work and when writing poetry. However, I’d be lying if I denied that this show-up part had no significance.
The most tragic thing about all this was that I had to leave all these books in Poland. It would cost me a fortune to get them to Scotland. But after seventeen years here, I’m slowly building a new collection, although this time I try not to overdo it and, of course, to read them regularly, but the ratio of books read to unread is still not the best. It seems that the Japanese term tsundoku is still closer to the truth than not in my case.
hidden pilcrow 