ADDICTION
I’ve spent the day sorting books and sorting my files. For years I haven’t been able to resist buying photography books. When I was in my early twenties I would every year buy the Photography Annual and look through it again and again. But beginning in my sixties I began to buy second hand photography books. The printing over the years had become better and better and second hand book stores a a steady supply of terrific photography books for one half to one quarter of the new price.
I liked finding the books and bringing them home and looking through them. But soon I had filled all the bookshelves inside the house with no place to put new books. That is when my delight in buying books should have told me that I was shifting from a pleasure to an addiction. I kept on buying books but now I had to store them somewhere so I put bookshelves in the carport and in the laundry room, justifying this by telling myself I could go out to either one and pick out a book and look at it.
But not only did I not do that, my addiction was so strong that soon there were no empty shelves anywhere and all I could do was to store the new photography books in Ingles cardboard milk boxes. Which I did. Soon I was stacking those boxes in front of the shelves of photo books which I had told myself I would look at. But now I couldn’t get to them any more.
And finally the fever broke. I didn’t attend Photobooks Anonymous, I didn’t stop buying books, I just realized, as I had realized with my flea market addiction years before, when we had to enclose the carport because it was stuffed with flea market stuff, that there was no room for any more books.
It was partly online Bookbub that allowed me to buy ebooks for $1.99 or $2.99 and store them on line in the cloud that let me go on buying print books, not photo books, and to store them on line and to take an entire library with me whenever I traveled.
It was deciding to go digital with everything—movies, music, art, TV shows, newspapers, magazines and photographs—that saved me.
I stopped buying photo books and novels cold turkey. I was no long interested in anything I couldn’t store in the Cloud.
But of course that left me with music CD’s, movie DVD’s, videotapes, even phonograph records and now not only thirty or forty boxes of photo books, but 30 or 40 boxes of paperback books.
And now I am acutely aware of what my addiction has caused. Now I have to dispose of these 40 boxes of photo books, which I am helped to do by Jamey who lost a bookstore full of books in the Marshall flood. I have given him 24 boxes of photo books and have another 20 ready. And then I hope he will take the 40 boxes of paperback books to at least fill his shelves until he can restock his shelves with more sellable books. So that is what I did today, three days before I leave for San Miguel de Allende, sorting through photo books, keeping a very few and sending the rest off to Jamey.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 