Bibliophiles Anonymous, Anyone?

Hello, everyone.

My name is Dave, and... And...

(Keep it together, damn it!)

...and I'm a bookaholic.

Please don't look down on me, because as much as I may be addicted to text, to the pleasures and minutiae of the written word, I am not a debilitated downer but rather a ravenous reader. I consume texts, at an alarming rate; but only rarely do they totally consume me. And when that does happen, I have the good sense to not wallow in my own self-awareness, but seek instead to share the joy of my discoveries to others. I refuse to be held down by my addiction; no, I rise up from it, like a phoenix new born with each new great read!

And besides, though I have submitted myself to the mercy of this outing, I do have more outlets than this for dealing with my obsession. Like LibraryThing, for instance. There aren't many places, after all, where I can exercise the same kind of compulsive control over my books as I do with the physical collection that sits on my bookshelves -- alphabetical by author, chronological by date of publication, and almost all in looks-like-they-were-never-even-read condition. Plus, as one constantly on the lookout for new reads, groups like "1001 Books to Read Before You Die" fit wonderfully for people like me who set absurdly excessive goals and hold ridiculously unreasonable expectations for themselves. Plus it gives me at least 900 more future acquisitions.

So, as you might expect, the last thing you want to do with someone like me is to put me in a position where I can acquire a large number of books at one time, particularly if that acquisition comes at little or no cost to me. Which is precisely what happened a week and a half ago.

The Thursday before last, my ENGL 602 class (a 75-minute weekly seminar that teaches us how to teach rhetoric and composition classes) did not meet in its normal setting but rather held a book fair, featuring four major textbook publishers. The goal of the fair was to see a variety of books in the hopes that, having seen them, you'll know which text you'll want to use next year when there is no more 602 and you're essentially on your own. For me, though the required first-year book, Making Sense, was organized rather well, it had a huge number of readings, few of which I used in class. For as much money as textbooks cost, I want to make sure I use them for all they're worth, so I went to the fair looking for a brief, compact book that explained different varieties of essay styles and perhaps a more accessible way of introducing grammar into my classroom.

Shortly after arriving, I fell upon one of my all-time textbook loves, Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. Sure, not everyone is in love with this book, but it's compulsively readable in the strangest way, and I love that it presents its case in a prescriptive but firm style. Like Lynne Truss's books, I may not agree with everything this says, but I damn sure love that they stick to it with conviction. Plus, let's face it, grammar texts that students will want to read don't come around often.

I must have been coddling the book a little too closely for a little too long because I was approached by a rep from the publishing house. I was planning on my polite refusal of assistance, and started sidling slowly away to avoid whatever pitch I anticipated she was planning, but instead of trying to sell me on something, she merely invited me to -- gasp! -- take the book. Just take it.

W-w-what?!

Turns out all I had to do was provide a little contact info and I could take any book on their table. Suddenly, my world opened up. I could take any books I wanted, at no cost to me! The fair was suddenly middling no longer.

I perused the next two publishers' tables in depth, looking for any books that caught my eye. Sadly, there weren't many, although I was able to snag a copy of the brief edition of Everything's an Argument, a text I'd heard through the grapevine would fit my needs rather well. So I had my potential textbook and my grammar guide -- mission accomplished!

Of course, I hadn't reached the fourth table yet. And when I saw who was at this fourth table, my jaw almost literally dropped.

Norton.

I feel like non-academics might not quite understand how big a deal this is, so permit me to pander just a touch here. Norton is the publisher of two of the finest academic resources for literary scholars: the Norton Critical Edition, landmark texts that are loaded with critical essays and explanatory glosses; and Norton Anthologies, which are essentially the industry-standard one-stop-shop for the important texts of literary history. So for the English graduate student, this table was a damn-near-literal bookgasm of monumental proportions.

They had Norton Critical Editions. They had Norton Anthologies (LOTS of them). They had other, less well-known collections. They had random great books (like Kafka's Amerika and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf). And best of all, in fitting with the nature of the fair, all of these were up for grabs if we wanted them, simply by signing our name.

When it was all said and done, I wasn't sure how many I signed up for, but I felt a little bad for having asked for so much -- so bad that I helped bring boxes of books back to Burroughs to be placed in mailboxes. (Full disclosure: It also didn't hurt that the Norton rep was young, cute, and female.) I knew I wasn't getting any of those books that day, but I knew they would have to come eventually.

Eventually meant yesterday. There, sitting in the mailroom, were three relatively large boxes weighing an absurd amount. Carrying them to the bus, then to my car, then into my apartment -- in the rain, no less -- was a chore, but when I got inside and opened the boxes, the effort was suddenly well worth it.

Between the texts I'd gotten from Norton, and the couple others I'd requested that also came, I had about twenty new books. Including FIVE Norton Anthologies -- English Literature (Eighth Edition), volumes 1 and 2; American Literature (Seventh Edition); Short Fiction (Seventh Edition); and Shakespeare (Second Edition). It didn't take much math for me to figure out that these books alone (which are roughly 3000 pages each) constituted an absurd amount of text, and there was much more beneath them.

So I did a quick count after I'd opened everything. In the end, the amount of pages I received in that shipment was roughly 19,500.

I'll type that one more time, just in case you think it's a typo. 19,500. As in, nineteen thousand five hundred pages.

Given this revelation, what do you think the bibliophile in me thought? If you guessed that I was satisfied, you're only partially right. Because as soon as I noticed how close I was to a nice round number, I simply couldn't resist taking a little trip and reaching the milestone.

So I ventured out to the Barnes & Noble on the Benner Pike and bought a book that I've walked past in the bookstores many a time before, but simply couldn't bring myself to buy. Until yesterday. James Joyce's Ulysses. Which, based solely on its reputation, is probably going to bring the pain, and bring it hard.

But having acquired that, I can now claim that in one day, I received over twenty thousand pages of text, and for it all I paid a grand total of $16.22.

My name is Dave, and I am a bookaholic.

The story should end here, since I've come full-circle. But since I finally gave in and bought the book that I've known for a while would challenge me like few others, I decided to truly go for the gusto. I searched on Amazon earlier tonight, and with a few quick clicks, committed myself to my reading project for the summer.

Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (or In Search of Lost Time, in English). A novel that is over 4,000 pages in length -- in the Modern Library translation, 4,344 pages, to be exact. The novel that holds the Guinness record for the longest novel ever published in English. And the novel that, despite a number of highly avant-garde and unpublished works that have emerged in the last century, still remains the longest novel ever to be published and popularly received in English.

This is the task that I have voluntarily set myself to for the summer, despite having acquired over 20,000 pages of new text in the past 48 hours alone.

My name is Dave, and I am a bookaholic. And I fear I am too far gone to be saved.

Have mercy on me.