The American Spectator

In any event, Churchill said the reader should pick up his books, page through them, scan the table of contents, and read parts of them. Basically, you should make friends with the volumes, knowing where to find them when you need them. This seems reasonable — if you are Winston Churchill and not a compulsive book-buyer who cannot afford the moving costs of books he purchases over the course of his life.

Thomas Jefferson had collected something like six or seven thousand books (the precise number escapes me). But neither Jefferson nor Churchill had to cope with TV, DVDs, CDs, PTAs, little league, and all the distractions of modern life that keep your modern bibliophile from actually reading all those books he buys, be they new or used. (The hunt for used books is another interesting mutation of the disease that will have to wait for another time.)

The final stage of this disease is the legacy phase. The bibliophile convinces himself that he is accumulating a library for his children, the local public library, or the boys’ prep school he attended. “Yeah, that’s the ticket. I am doing it for the children.”

It is all so sad, a library of unread books.