It is nice to see someone has my addiction to books. I love everything about them. I love them so much that as I'm reading I handle the book very gently as not to bend the cover or crease a page. After I read a book you cannot tell it has ever been read. I have fond memories of my mother taking me to the library from the time I was very small.This love of books was instilled in me then and I have since passed it on to my two children who are five and fourteen.

When I'm feeling a bit depressed, I go to the bookstore. Mind you, I usually don't want to spend any money when I'm depressed, it just makes me feel better to be around lots of books.

It's the BEST feeling to know that I have a good book waiting for me after I do whatever it is that needs doing during the day!
I know, I know....it's one of the great perks of being retired.
Retirement is the best gift I ever gave myself!

Unfortunately it gives me more time to stock my book pantry from library sales, book sales, garage sales....you name it!

I decided recently to sell off some of the books that I don't need by using Ebay. During this time my hubby decided to help out and accidentally took the box of books and donated them to the local senior citizen center!!!
Of course they sold on Ebay and after frantically searching for the box I figured out what happened and went to the center and found all the books on their book shelf and took them back!!!

My aunt used to tell about coming to visit when I was a kid and finding me sitting on a stack of books to keep my little sister from tearing them up. Obviously there never was a time when I wasn't "goofy" about books!

I can easily get into a "panic attack" if I don't have at least one interesting book to look forward to. (It feels like not having any food in the refrigerator.) And the stack of books by the bed are the only thing that makes wee hours of the morning bearable for this insomniac!

It's a pretty good indication that you're goofy about books when, as the clerk at Barnes & Noble fills up two large shopping bags with your bargain books assortment, he asks if you always buy books by the pound.

I have been known to wander around the house aimlessly after finishing a book...it isn't enough to have lots of stacks of TBR's in different rooms-I want to know what I am going to read next.

I grew up without a TV in the house and my Mother was an avid reader and helped me get a library card as soon as it was permitted - we walked ( no car) a long way to the library on Saturday mornings when my Mother was off work to restock, so I came by my reading fascination by osmosis!

Pat

My tbr bookcases are better stocked than my pantry.

I'm so goofy about them that I can't bring myself to get rid of any of my old ones, even brittle-paged old paperbacks that I'm sure I will never read again. Ever read China Court by Rumer Godden where a stash of old books saved the day?

Once in a seminar we were asked to write in ten minutes as many uses for a book as we could think of besides for reading. After decorating and raising a small child up to the table, I couldn't think of anything else. Several people had a great number of things, including squashing bugs and using as an umbrella in a rain storm. My mother said it wasn't a fair question for me because I love my books too much to consider anything that would damage them. (I never could "think outside the box" very well, though.)

How goofy about books am I?

Umm, my husband never says, "MAKE A DECISION! IT'S ME OR THE BOOKS!" because he knows he'll lose.

PAM

Goofy enough that I took a job at the circ desk of our local library as my "re-entry" job after being a SAHM for 10 years. Compared to my old salary, I may as well be being paid in Monopoly money. On the other hand, I am happily wallowing in books at work, at my book club, volunteering at my children's school library and doing the Junior Great books program at their school.

I pulled up this old thread because I wanted to start a similar one but found that the postings here say so much of what I wanted to say and discuss.

I have always been goofy about books. I don't own a lot of books, I read them first and then I buy the ones I can't live without. However I am sort of rethinking this as someone somewhere on these boards planted in my mind the thought that you can't trust libraries to continue to keep the right books. So now I find myself buying more, but I am selective.

If I can say this anywhere without being hauled off for an extended psychiatric stay it is here. When I go to a bookstore and I see a well loved story on the shelf I sigh and reach out to touch the binding. I did just that this summer...I think it was Poisonwood Bible or I Capture the Castle....and my niece, a booklover herself, looked at me strangely. When I explained she still looked at me strangely, maybe even more so.
Well maybe I am strange when it comes to books.

The apartment was entirely, was only, for her: a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked. She had kept some books since college that she had acquired for courses and never readÂFrederick Jameson, for example, and Kant's Critique of JudgmentÂbut which suggested to her that she was, or might be, a person of seriousness, a thinker in some seeping, ubiquitous way; and she had kept, too, a handful of children's books taken from her now-dismantled girlhood room, like Charlotte's Web, and the Harriet the Spy novels, that conjured for her an earlier, passionately earnest self, the sober child who read constantly in the back of her parents' Buick. Â She did not display photographs or mementoes of any kind. She abhorred tchotchkes.

from The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud

Another goofy thing I do... I only lend certain books out and even then, to friends I trust to return them. If a book stays away too long, I ask to check on it. Bless my friends, they understand it's not personal... it's a book thing.

And a note to you, gooseberry girl: Petting books is as natural as petting your beloved dog or cat.
PAM

I feel the same way about petting books being as natural as petting your dog or cat, with the added bonus that the books don't make me break out in hives or make my eyes swell.

It is, however, hard to explain when DH catches me sitting with a pile of books around me and asks what I'm doing when he sees me with my nose literally stuck between the pages of a book. "I'm smelling it," usually earns me a look of concern and a suggestion that perhaps I should seek professional help.

I understand Cordelia better now: 'I cannot heave my heart into my mouth'

I have books I'm reading in every room of the house. Additionally, there are books in my car, in my purse and I keep a couple of books at work, "just in case".
My mother gets more books from me than from the library.
I sometimes dream I am in the book I'm reading at the time. Right now I'm reading a book about the little villages of Sicily, and last night I dreamt of Etna.
I am annoyed right not that the book-binding course I wanted to attend filled up before I could register, because my poor, damaged books will have to wait 4 months before I can get another course.
Is that goofy enough?

Here is a discussion I came across on another reading forum. Parts of it are quite funny and I found descriptions of many of my bookish habits.

Here is a link that might be useful: You might be a pretentious bookwork if...

I think I may have posted this on another thread, but it seems appropriate here:

Books to the ceiling, books to the sky.
My piles of books are a mile high.
How I love them!
How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

Of course, you caress books; you caress the head of a small beloved child, don't you?

Thanks everyone for reassuring me of my sanity. I didn't doubt it for a minute but still it's nice to know I am not alone.

cjoseph, that quote is wonderful...I may have to read that book.

twobigdogs...for a really favorite book that I think others will want to borrow I have two copies.

color, you made me laugh out loud!

netla, your link brought me to a movie site.

gbg,

gbg, did you scroll down beyond the header? The thread is part of a book discussion forum on the IMDB forums.

Oh Carolyn ky - yuk!

Caress a BOOK like a 'the head of a small child' ? What? Are we all going mad? Let's get some kind of perspective on this.

I LOVE YOU ALL!

Dido1..... what on earth do you mean, "get some perspective"! Surely you don't prefer small children to books!

If one were to caress a book from the local library it would be necessary to wear surgical gloves. And as for caressing pets and small children, other than ones own; it has become a punishable offence over here.

I've never 'caressed' a book in my life. It's never appealed to me, somehow. (neither did children till I got a couple of Grandones). Though I do treat books quite nicely, if I like them. There are very few I have thrown through the nearest window -I mean, I'm not actually cruel to them (I once threw a cat from an upstairs window...... but it was a chalet bungalow, before you accuse me of Felicide)

I also don't caress motor cars, television sets, table-lamps, laptops, (though I'm quite fond of my Apple, when it behaves nicely) - the list is endless of nice, everyday things which give me pleasure but which I don't terribly want to embrace. It had actually never occurred to me. I ought to try it though.....Which one shall I begin with - book, I mean.....?

Dido

I don't EVER lend my books out... to anyone. I would rather buy a new copy of the book and give it to someone rather than lend it out... my books are such friends!

One of my favorite smells is when you very first walk into Barnes and Nobel... I always take a couple of big smells.. Ahhh.. Lots of fresh new books!!

The only inanimate object that calls to me (other than fabric, as I am first of all a quilter, and therefore a fabriholic) is a book and the inclination to touch, to smell, to surround oneself with them is similar with both. My bookcases are stuffed full, as are my shelves of fabric - it's almost like hoarding - and when I've finished a really good book that I've really immersed myself in, yes, there are a few moments of indecision while I quickly pick out the next one to begin - I cannot be without an ongoing book, just as I cannot be without a quilt in progress - it's just too unsettling. Books draw me to them - I could have over 100 books not yet read in my shelves, and I'm still seeking out more. (I don't loan out any book ever - did it once, and not everyone respects books - let alone that it was someone else's property!)

I think I'm in the above camp, re touch, smell, etc. Which is why reading a book on line would never satisfy me. I like the sensation of holding the tome in my hands and even writing in the margins, if so desired. I've worked in historical libraries and recall loving the scent of certain musty, antiquarian, leather bound volumes.

When I lived abroad, most of the time French books I bought had to have their pages slit/cut, before you could read them.I even found that task enjoyable!