Reading them is just part of the pleasure

From The Point, an elegant reflection on the allure of books:

In Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady, a hapless suitor named Ned Rosier courts the innocent Pansy Osmond. Rosier is best known as a lifelong collector of rare books called bibelots. After Pansy ejects him, Rosier liquidates his collection of bibelots, hoping to become rich enough to impress her father. This move backfires immediately: those close to Pansy tell Rosier that he would have been better off to keep his “pretty things,” and that his books were “the best thing about him.”

Here as elsewhere in Portrait, a novel by a writer who believed above all else in the enriching power of literature, we see books made into objects of novelty, vanity and status. Isabel Archer, the book’s protagonist, never picks up a book for more than a few minutes before becoming sleepy or distracted; the journalist Henrietta Stackpole, meanwhile, serves primarily as comic relief, writing all her friends and acquaintances into her articles. This literary materialism certainly does not reflect James’s own attitude—he would rather his characters have just read the damn bibelots—but it is also not particular to the cast of Portrait, or to aristocrats like Rosier.

Delight in book collecting, and in showing off one’s book collection, is common, if not universal, among readers and would-be-readers. The biggest reason we spend money on books is because we want to read them (eventually), but that isn’t the only reason: we also like to look at them, and to look at other people looking at them. While moving into my new apartment this month I found myself casting long, admiring glances at my full bookshelves, straightening out folded pages and making sure the spines were perfectly lined up. I have devoted most of my moving time to arranging these shelves; books accounted for probably 90 percent of the weight I had to lift up three flights of stairs into my apartment. When I move out in two years, I will have to do it all again. Why do I—why do we—devote so much time, energy, space and money to these $15 hunks of paper? Why do I risk compressed discs every time I move into a new apartment? Or, to put it another way: Why don’t I just buy a Kindle?....