Why do you collect books?

Some books I can give away without a second thought. Let someone else suffer reading them as much as I did. Other books keep surviving the periodic bookshelf purge. These books occasionally disturb me like pets. My wife and I love to keep around and hold them. We promise ourselves that we will read them again, SOMETIME. We carry them from here to there, read a little bit of this one or that one and put them down. We have become addicted to them. Why?When I was a child, the books my family kept in cabinets with glass doors were pretty things. Most of them were leather bound; many had gold filigree on the cover and elaborate high-quality pictures inside or glued to the cover. As I learned to read, I put my hands on The Tigers of Mompracen and Thousand and One Nights. What delightful looking books.Today, the overwhelming majority of books are sort of cheap looking. Covers are repetitive and loud. This does not reflect a lack of designers’ creativity, but the narrow mind of certain readers who demand sameness.After reading each book, I remember the broad brush strokes of the writers’ imagination, but to tell the truth, the finer details of the images recede into the back of my mindSo why do I keep these books? CAN YOU tell me why you keep your book collection?