I steal books. Or, rather, I used to steal books, when I was young. I’m forty now, and haven’t stolen a book in nineteen years. Do you believe that? I’m not to be trusted.

I buy books. That’s true. When I return home after buying books—novels, volumes of poetry, monographs on French filmmakers, tracts on Irish history and Slavic history and evolution and Rimbaud, remaindered philosophy, remaindered anthropology, remaindered semiotic theory, long-discarded Seventies science fiction paperbacks, transcribed interviews with Noam Chomsky, collections of favorite comic strips for the bathroom (Calvin and Hobbes has acquired, since our son turned five, an almost Delphic authority)—my wife repeats the same, only remotely tolerant cavil: “Just what we need, more books.” Or, often, “We have enough books.” To her, books are a quantity, an amassing infestation, like silverfish the size of sandwiches. Her assumption is self-evidently stupefying: that at least in some important ways all books are more or less the same, are more or less interchangeable, that a particular number of books, once acquired like sections of fencing or patio bricks, is universally sufficient for whatever purposes one could possibly have for them. Laurel is not a non-reader; on the contrary, our courtship was a blissful storm of bookish passion founded on our separate core-rings having both been hit, years earlier, by the lightning of Wuthering Heights. We were fiercely, if only temporarily, fascinated with antique books (particularly if they bore engravings), which we bought each other for Christmas. If I had three times as many books as she did upon our setting up house together, her personal freight itself doubled that of anyone else we knew or knew about.

Three children and a mortgage later, the ceaseless propagation of a library has simply fallen from her docket of priorities. “You can get rid of half of these,” she’ll groan. The most rueful aspect of her antagonism is that she, once, had the quiet hunting jones that still possesses me in used bookstores; the perhaps self-congratulatory satisfaction of being surrounded on all sides, from the floor to the ceiling, by read and heretofore unread world literature (who doesn’t love their unread books more intensely than their read?); the happiness that comes not from merely reading books, but possessing them—and in this, used books, books with histories and notes and smudged love left on them like coffee rings, were even preferable to new. (Libraries always possessed a limited utility for me—borrowing, returning.) “Look at these—will you ever read them all?” Perhaps, perhaps not; what if I don’t? It’s not as if the goddamn things will expire into a moldy pile, or grow obsolete and...