I need an intervention. Something to quell my obsession. My obsession for books. You see, I’ve become a bibliophile of late – a person who “collects or has a great love for books”.
Ordinarily this would be a good thing. It’s healthy to surround one’s self with books. Encouraged even. The Japanese even have a word for it: Tsundoku. And recent studies have shown that kids who grow up in households with lots of books wind up being smarter than their peers. But what I’ve been going through lately goes beyond any mere appreciation for books. Rather my goal is to have the greatest book collection in the entire world. A goal whose timeline I’ve accelerated while in quarantine in light of the fact that I may be running out of time to put it together.
It’s gotten to the point where I actually think I may have even achieved my goal. Sure, other people probably have larger collections that mine (I met a guy today who claimed to own 25,000 books at one point) or more valuable collections complete with autographed copies, rare first editions, and the like. But my entire collection is solely focused on non-fiction books about science, technology, the history of innovation, and the future. I highly doubt there’s anyone out there collecting the exact same stuff that I am. And so that’s why I’m so confident in the greatness of my collection. Some of the things that I have are just absolutely amazing. I would put up my collection up against anyone’s. And I would have said the same about a month ago before I went out over the last few weeks and added another 150 or so books to the collection. Remember when I said I was obsessed? I wasn’t kidding. Forgot about counting how many books I have. I’m now at the point where I’m counting how many different places I keep books. I’m up to 19 in case you were wondering.
There’s just one problem with my collection: until now no one even knew that it existed. And even if I wasn’t quarantining only a handful of my family or friends would ever get to see it. I want to change that when I die. Donate everything to a museum or library. Create the Craig Shames Shrine to Scientific Literature. But that is hopefully a long time off. What do I do before then?!
Well, that’s where the Collectors Collective would come in. A place for collectors to show off their collections no matter what they feature. Books. Antiques. Baseball cards. Beanie babies. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you’re passionate about something, have a world class compilation of it, and a desire to share your life’s work with the world.
What I’m envisioning then is a community website that lets people post their collections while browsing others. People could like, comment, and share just like on a social media site or even purchase, sell, or swap items. It would be like if eBay, Pinterest, and Facebook had a baby. And it would be the greatest thing ever.
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