My rough guess is that I currently own 700 books. Among serious bibliophiles this is small beer. (When my friend Edward Shils died in 1995, he left a library in his Chicago apartment of 15,000 books, and had another 6,000 in his small house in Cambridge in England.) I’ve kept 90 or so volumes from the Library of America, the books of my favorite writers (Gibbon, Tolstoy, Henry James, Proust, George Santayana, Max Beerbohm, Thomas Mann, and Hugh Trevor-Roper), and books on subjects in which I have a continuing interest (Greek history and philosophy, French literature, modern poetry up to 1960 or so), and the books of friends. Enough here, one would think, to keep a fellow busy.
Read the rest of Joseph Epstein here.
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