Discarded delights: The joy of ex-library books (2021)

If you are going to collect books as physical objects, rather than their much more convenient digital versions, then it strikes me you should actually find the signs of previous interactions with that object (library stamps, marks from other readers etc) make them more interesting than pristine copies that no one has read.

Personally I do like these marks. But I buy books to read, not as an investment. I recently bought a book on "How to survive being gassed" published in 1934. It had a typed A4 sheet of paper in it with a poem about how to identify the different types of gas. Humourous and probably useless but real and very alive.

I also take umberidge with the idea that digital books are more convenient. A physical book is more engaging, more beautiful, more real and more present than a digital book. All things that I find convenient when I want to interact with knowledge and art. Horses for courses I assume.