On Acquiring Books: A Cautionary Note to the Young
Whenever someone asks me about my rather large collection of books and whether I’ve read all of them my response is always the same- ‘I’ve read some of all, and all of some’. Collecting books for scholars is like collecting comics for geeks or collecting stamps for old women or collecting baseball cards for wanna-be athletes. It’s something we just do. And we do it with vigor.
Booksellers know our addictive personalities and how we desire their product so that the likes of Brill will boldly charge $200 for a 150 page book and smile about it all the way to the bank. Books are like crack or meth; once addicted, always addicted.
So to spare the young the trials of marital disgruntled-ness and the horror of having more books than space to put them- I have some sage, sane, and sound advice- and it’s quite easy to remember:
Only buy a book if you are going to read it more than twice. If you aren’t sure that you’ll make regular use of it, just get it from the library or read a review of it or a summary by someone who has read it.
If this advice were followed lots of books would not be littering lots of scholars shelves collecting dust and serving only as some sort of perverse ‘badge of honor’. You know, the scholarly ‘my collection is bigger than yours’ nonsense that fills the corridors of SBL gatherings around the world.
Reference books ought to be purchased and held on to. You need bibles in a variety of languages as well as, of course, the Hebrew and Greek. You need a Septuagint. A Vulgate. You need Greek and Hebrew Grammars. You need commentaries. You need a Church history. You need Systematic Theologies by folk who aren’t fadists. You need standard theological works like Luther’s Works and Calvin’s and Zwingli’s and Aquinas’s. You need an OT Theology and a NT Theology. You need a History of Israel (but not Bright’s or Longman’s because they aren’t useful). And that’s essentially all you need.
Save yourself my young friends, from the horror of possessing more than you will read in 10 lifetimes by the time you are 30.
One of my teachers made the point over 25 years ago when he said to us: “Once my friend and I were discussing our libraries. I was boasting of mine and he looked me dead in the face and said ‘I gave mine away- every single volume- because I didn’t own my library, my library owned me’.” The point was made.
I haven’t always lived by the advice I’ve just given and I still buy books I only read once or twice (though most of the things I buy now are indeed keepers). And some I don’t even make it all the way through (like Hector Avalos’ idiotic and quite useless pandering to the atheists). Nevertheless, give heed and pay attention to what I’ve told you, and you’ll thank me when you’re 50.
