librorum

I went to the bookstore the other day while my sisters were clothes shopping.  I used to be a bit of a book addict when I was younger, in fact I would often be grounded from reading because I would opt to read a book rather than do my chores or homework or sleep...
But it had been a long time since I had stepped foot in a bookstore (not including the university bookstore, because that doesn't count since every book in there is heinously overpriced and written by some presumptuous professor...) and at first, I was a little unsure of what to do there.  

Obviously, my tastes in literature have changed since I was a young girl scurrying excitedly around the fiction shelves, so I took my time to peruse the shelves, pausing in the philosophy and religion section, then moving toward the sport section to see what kinds of soccer books they had, then finding myself in the leather-bound journal section (which is a section that involves looking at ALL the books, and feeling them and smelling them and loving them...Every book should be leather-bound.) But I did reconnect with my dormant bibliophile.

Unfortunately, I did not end up taking any books home with me, as I'm at university right now, and don't really have much money or space for all the books I want to have.

Plus there's a lending library that I frequent.

But one day, I do plan to obtain a large and beautiful library of my own, with a cozy chair by the fire.  And a dumbwaiter, because it's quaint, and because I'll probably spend hours in that library, and someone will need to send me sustenance without disturbing me.

How to obtain a library

That might just be the way to go, really.  Because his books are old, and old books, in addition to being relatively hard to find, are THE BEST.

This brings me to the slight dilemma called: what kinds of books will I put in my beastly library?

Well, there are three kinds of books:

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and a few to be chewed and digested."
    -Francis Bacon

So we have those books that look interesting, and you pick them up and get a few chapters in, and find that they're really not that interesting or worthwhile, and you don't even finish them.  They don't have to taste bad, they're just not something you want to finish, for whatever reason.  Maybe you're even too full already.
Then the books that you read entirely, and you get something out of them, but then you're done with that book (and possibly that author) and you won't necessarily choose to read it again until you're obligated to do so.  They're like vegetables.  They're probably good for you, but you have to grow up with people making you eat them before you really care for them.
Finally, we have the books that you can never really get tired of. The authors you always turn to. They take you forever to read because you enjoy them so much, and continually pause to go "aaaaahhhhh" and revel in the sentence you just read.  They're books that are made out of pure bacon.

And really, I would want to select bacon-quality books for my library.  And get multiple copies, too, so I can annotate them, and then annotate them again, and then other people can annotate them...

The only problem here was already identified by our friend Francis Bacon.  Only a few books are bacon books.
And yes, I can list plenty of books right now that I would consider to be literary bacon, but  when you think of the outrageous number of books there are in the world (even if you're only counting those printed in languages you can read)...there is an unfortunate bacon shortage.

Which is why being well-read and having an extensive library means having vegetable books too.
Vegetables are not inherently unenjoyable, they're just not bacon.  And as delicious as it might be, having an entire library filled with copies of The Great Gatsby and the works of Oscar Wilde wouldn't necessarily be the best of libraries.

But there will definitely be two copies of Gatsby.