Walter Benjamin on Collecting Books

O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure!

“You have all heard of people whom the loss of their books has turned into invalids, or of those who in order to acquire them became criminals. These are the very areas in which any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.” (60)

I finally read Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” the first piece in Illuminations. Mine is a worn paperback edition from the library of Richard J. Parmentier, Dept. of Anthropology at Brandeis University. I can’t remember where I bought the book, but it must have cost $8.50—as marked in pencil on the inside cover beside Parmentier’s stamp.

Let’s say I found my copy of Illuminations in 2018 at Commonwealth Books in Boston. I had read PDF versions of individual essays from the text at Sarah Lawrence. I didn’t read anything from my paperback until today. I wasn’t in a rush.