t one time, I wanted to own every book in the world. If you had come to visit me, you wouldn't have seen a house and home—you'd have seen a used book store, filled with thousands of volumes. Back then, I scorned libraries. Read a book and then let it slip through my fingers? Preposterous! You see, reading a book was not enough. I had to own it. I had to own them all. The younger me of then, looking at the older me of now, would be extremely jealous, because each day the mail brings review copies from all of the publishing companies out there to help me decide which books to bring to your attention. I'm afraid that the me of then would also be very disappointed in the me of now, because now that I find myself in that enviable position of receiving free books, I am no longer trying to devour the world.
I had tried to collect not only every science-fiction book every written, but also every book, SF or otherwise, ever written by any author who had written any SF. Not only did I have all of the SF of Isaac Asimov, I also had to have his nonfiction as well, even a copy of An Easy Introduction to the Slide Rule. The same thing went for Robert Silverberg, whose collection wouldn't have been complete without Empires in the Dust: Ancient Civilizations Brought to Light. The same was true for countless other writers. To understand an author, it wasn't enough for me to casually read that author, I also had to personally own every word that he or she had ever produced.
I wasn't even what you might call a discriminating reader, at least not in terms of purchases. Oh, I would make judgements about the books I had read. But still, regardless of my reaction, I had to own them all, good authors and bad, classics and trash, until the house barely left room in which a person could move around. And then, one day, it changed.
Owning isn't everything
It was the fault of one very bad book from one very good author. I will spare his name and the name of the book here, because I was as much to blame as he was. Perhaps I had reached some toxic level of word ownership, and it was time to cut back. At the time, I'd always heard people say they had thrown a book across the room, and up until that day I had thought it was just a figure of speech. But then I found out that it could be true, as halfway through the pages I actually threw it across the room, and said, "What am I doing here? Why must I read everything? Why must I own everything?" And the very next day I started packing up my collection and dispersing it to friends, used book stores and the local library.
I once heard of a reader who solved his book-owning problems by setting himself an upper limit. Whether that upper limit was 100 books, or 250 books or 500 books, he could own only that specific number, and not add a new book to that bookcase until he got rid of an old one. I haven't gotten quite that rigid about it, but still, I know that the old me visiting the new me would look around and say, "Where did all the books go?"
Though I still read endlessly, I no longer feel a need to own the world. The words have become more important to me than the books, the wine more important than the bottle. Before adding a title to my permanent collection, I ask myself, "Would I die without this book? Do I need it to give my life meaning? Isn't having it in my mind enough?"
What do I own anyway when I own a book? The author's soul, which does not have to be on paper. I can even read a novel or a short-story collection on my Visor, and yes, it is weightless, and no, I don't smell the paper, but it is still mind speaking to mind, just as surely as in the old days, when I had to own it all, or not feel complete.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science
Fiction Weekly back in 1974, when he began working as an assistant editor at
Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in
the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the
award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, and also edited SCI
FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel, in addition to
Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. A collection of his short fiction, These Words Are Haunted, has just been published by Wildside Press.
