Richard Pryor with a Research Fund

Up until now, my book-buying strategy has been fairly simple: Do I need it? Is it cheap? Could I just as easily check it out of the library or make a pirated version from someone else's copy? This rubric was governed by grad school economics, limited shelf space and my inherited tendency toward thrift.


Now I have one long wall of my office sparsely populated by books, a salary and research funds to spend, and an institutional library that doesn't have everything I need. Also, I have book envy. My biggest insecurity these days is that I have no books. Every time I walk into a colleague's office, I'm awestruck at how many books he or she has: hundreds and hundreds, entire walls carpeted by the collected works of Tolstoy, every work of obscure literary theory ever published, translations, novels, journals... all there, lining the shelves of tweed-coated professors all over campus. Suddenly my grad school thrift is supremely uncool, and I want books.

Happily, I've been discovering used and new bookstores all over the place: Raven Books in Northampton, Meetinghouse Books in South Deerfield, Schoenhof's in Cambridge, The Bookmill in Montague, and Powell's, Abe's, Alibris, Moe's, and University Press Books in ciberespacio. Also, you wouldn't believe what academic presses will send you for free when you're sporting institutional letterhead and need to review a book for a class: it's a beautiful thing, the desk copy. Freeing myself up to buy all the books I might once have passed over has been a Brewster's Millions-like game. Is it relevant to anything I have done, might someday do or might someday contemplate doing? Ergo, buy it.

Slowly but surely I'm filling up those shelves with volumes, filling my academic coffers with scholarly gold, if you will. Of course, I don't have time to actually read any of these additions to my library right now, but just knowing they're there when I need them is a comfort in and of itself. The way I see it, there are worse things to conspicuously consume. Like Hummers. Or diamonds.

* By the way, the above catchy slogan is available on bumper stickers and T-shirts from buyolimpia.com, one of my favorite purveyors of quality hipster wares. Seasonal gift-giving holidays are just around the corner!
** Yes, I do sometimes order from Amazon, but no, I don't buy anything at Barnes and Noble or Borders. Down with the literary industrial complex!