Confessions of a biblioholic

As one might expect of an academic, I adore books. I have had little time in the past year, however, to read anything more substantial than textbooks and magazine articles. After recovering from the travails of a dreadful summer school class, and having another week or two before I need to buckle down to more academic work, I've spent the past few days dreaming about adding to my book collection. After sending in the proofs for my first article, I decided to indulge my inner glutton. While out shopping the other day, I bought two tomes, one new to me and one old: Jessica Mitford's "The American Way of Death Revisited," and Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw/The Aspern Papers." Once I'd gone down the merry garden path of book purchasing, I had merely stoked my hunger for more.

I went through two book catalogues from Daedalus and ordered three more books, two for me and one for the kids. The two for me are a a biography of Gwen Raverat, a granddaughter of Charles Darwin and satellite member of the Bloomsbury Group, and a book by an evolutionary biologist about the Y chromosome. The kids' book presents what looks to be a delightful tale written by Virginia Woolf, accompanied by some charming illustration. Woolf is one of my all-time favorite authors, so I will devour the story greedily and hope that my kids will follow suit.

A terrible blow, however, came when I decided to reward myself with yet another book, memoirs of Diana Holman-Hunt that I had seen some time ago in the beautiful pages of the book catalog "A Common Reader." I went online to buy it, only to find that the company had gone bankrupt in December of 2005. I had from occasionally wondered absently why I hadn't received any of their catalogues for months, but I simply figured that I had fallen off their list after failing to purchase anything for so long. I am positively heartbroken to find that their extensive holdings will no longer be available in one place, and that one of my favorite ways to keep up with new books has evaporated. This only compounds the sense of melancholy I feel after Cody's Books closed their store in Berkeley last month. Where am I to browse? Oh sadness. At least I had the forethought and pack-rattiness to tear out pages from catalogues with books I wanted to buy in the future.