They don't call it mania. . .

""It's gotten so I can tell when I see that furrowed faraway gaze in the eyes of a customer in a used-book store, having come to a dead stop, that he is trying to conjure up his bookcases in his mind's eye and remember whether or not he has the book he has found."


"That's one of the things that all bookaholics share, like a common symptom of a genetic disease. You come across a fine volume and you can't remember if you have it, or maybe you have it with a different jacket, or maybe in paperback and here is this fine hardcover copy -- or is your copy back at home also hardcover?"

~ A Passion for Books, Three Rivers Press, 1999. Edited by Harold Rabinowitz & Rob Kaplan