A Bookstore Customer's Personal Collection

Chapter 1: The Joy of Bookstores (13)

When you buy books in that way, the collection lined up on your own bookshelf becomes like a map of your interests, an extension of your own mind.

When a bookshelf is in your living space, the spines and covers catch your eye throughout your daily life. If it is a book you have read before, its contents cross your mind each time; if it is a book you have not yet read, you might imagine what is inside or remember the moment you bought it, feeling a desire to read it someday.

These are things selected through the filter of you as an individual. Because they involve an expense, they are carefully chosen through a high-precision filter. When you line them up, trends begin to emerge. You might realize anew what you are interested in, or as you rearrange them, you might see connections between books and find new ideas being born. It is, so to speak, a library customized for yourself, which becomes the base for your daily reading and a tool for thinking.

That is why it is not enough to simply have a large library near your home. What is lined up there are, after all, shared books, arranged for the convenience of many users. The books you own privately have been carefully selected through your own intuition and wallet, and you can arrange them as you please, keep them in your favorite spots in your living space, and hold onto them forever. You can draw lines while reading, write your thoughts directly onto the pages, or even tear out the pages you need.

Thanks to the various markings I have made, I have almost established a 'Seigo-style marking method' since a certain period, and because of this, when I read those books years later, just following the markings makes the content rise up more three-dimensionally than it did when I first read them.
(...) In other words, it means treating a book as a notebook. A book is a notebook that already contains text.

Seigo Matsuoka, 'The Art of Extensive Reading' (Chikuma Shobo, 2009), pp. 84-86

Of course, there are people who want to cherish each book they have encountered and dislike getting them dirty. There is also the joy of carefully lining them up and admiring them, perhaps by putting covers on them. On the other hand, there is also the joy of using them thoroughly as tools and marking them up in your own way, and I am more of the latter type.

Since my living space is also limited, I cannot keep everything. However, even if I cannot keep or read everything, the fact that a carefully selected collection of books that I can treat as I like visualizes my interests in a corner of my room is a great appeal of having a personal library. It accumulates slowly as something deeply personal, different from the shelves of a bookstore or a library.

*Reprinted from 'A Reader for Future Bookstores' (NHK Publishing), pp. 40-42