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# Collecting books
- URL: https://www.lorcandempsey.net/collecting-books/
- Published: 2004-10-10T09:40:33.000Z
- Updated: 2004-10-10T09:40:33.000Z
- Author: Lorcan Dempsey
- Tags: Books, Systems

I have just had occasion to reread Walter Benjamin’s essay *Unpacking my library*. It is full of memorable lines (from the Zohn translation in the accessible [Illuminations](https://www.worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/ow/4f0bd37a5f9a27da.html?ref=lorcandempsey.net) collection):

> “The only exact knowledge there is,” says Anatole France, “is the knowledge of the date of publication and the format of books.” And indeed, if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue.  
> Anyone who buys from catalogues must have flair in addition to the qualities I have mentioned. Dates, place names, formats, previous owners, bindings and the like: all these details must tell him something – not as dry, isolated facts, but as a harmonious whole; from the quality and intensity of this harmony he must be able to recognize whether a book is for him or not.  
> Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter.  
> Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.  
> But what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accustomed itself to such an extent that it can appear an order?  
> *Habent sua fata libelli*: these words may have been intended as a general statement about books. So books like *The Divine Comedy*, Spinoza’s *Ethics*, and *The Origin of the Species* have their fates. A collector, however, interprets this Latin saying differently. For him, not only books, but copies of books have their fates. And in this sense, the most important fate of a copy is its encounter with him, with his own collection.

Benjamin emphasizes the private pleasures of the collector. Since I first read this many years ago, I have always thought that the initiate user of a library enjoys some of these pleasures also, and that certainly the librarian does.