For me there are few greater simple pleasures than being utterly surrounded by books. Thus, when I was forced to move to a tiny house in the city, I had to make a great many painful decisions as to what to take down there and what to put into storage. In the old house, we had put bookcases on every wall of the large living room, including a monstrous pair eight feet tall that took up 15+ feet of one wall and had shelves exactly the right height for paperbacks. And all the shelves were full to overflowing.

So I guess you could call me a 'hoarder.' ;) My wife calls me an insane packrat, and cannot understand why I can't even part with one of my two paperback copies of The Hunt for Red October (I have the original paperback cover and the newer one from after the movie came out). She doesn't understand why I would want to hang on to a paperback copy of a book if I also have the hardcover.

Now I have very few books at my fingertips (though all my O'Reillys made the cut and look awfully pretty on the shelf over my monitor) and I don't get to just sit surrounded by millions of pages of printed words in my own home. I have started visiting the local library (where I found a copy of TheDamian's Object-Oriented Perl, yay!), but it's not the same. On the other hand, I did just drag in two of our smaller bookcases from storage and have them anchored to the wall and awating over-loading. And everyone who knows me knows I love new books...

At any rate, we'll someday be able to move to a larger place, preferably one with a large windowless room (windows cut into the wallspace needed for shelves) and I'll be able to pull all those dozens of book boxes out of storage once again.

-rattus, wandering somewhat far afield from the original topic

__________
He seemed like such a nice guy to his neighbors / Kept to himself and never bothered them with favors
- Jefferson Airplane, "Assassin"