The enduring popularity of physical books in the digital age

Or Tom Verlaine, frontman for 1970s punk band Television, a collector of a different ilk, who died in 2023, having amassed a library of 50,000-plus titles about literature, art, the occult and spirituality almost entirely gleaned from discount bookstores (alongside some 4000 vinyl albums).

Books for Cooks’ Tim White describes collecting as “a gentle madness”. “Hoarding is an issue but collecting is, I think, endemic to the human condition. It gives us comfort.”

What people focus on is often eclectic but rarely random. Yvonne Frindle’s library has a functional role, but she’s also drawn to “weird stuff” within her areas of interest, often acquiring “obscure books that are maybe out of print, or that I suspect I wouldn’t be able to borrow or buy if I needed them in the future”.

Yee has somehow amassed a collection of Hungarian and South Korean literature in translation. For Tammy Egglestone, it was the Frankston serial killer in Melbourne, from the early 1990s on, that hooked her on true crime. She now some 600-odd crime volumes in her purpose-built, 850-book library. “I became fascinated with understanding why someone, particularly a serial killer, does what they do. From there, I started reading everything I could get my hands on when it came to true crime. Over the years, my collection has just continued to grow.” She has already read six books about Erin Patterson’s “mushroom killer” trial, which she attended. “I like to read all the evidence and hear everything for myself, and then form my own opinion based on what I’ve learned.”

Sydney accountant Margaret Lokmer collects books on nationalism, stemming from her uni days when she researched ethnicity and the pursuit of national identity, with a focus on the Bosnian conflict of the early 1990s. “There are the ones you devour and plan to re-read, there are some you use as a reference book, you think, oh, that might have something in it – but there’s many there that I haven’t read,” she admits.

Melburnian John Cleaves has a vast assortment of original pulp-crime paperbacks from the 1940s and 1950s alongside biographies of musicians, a few shelves of World War II histories and a collection of the adventures of the fictional flying ace Biggles, a throwback to his childhood. “And we’ve got a shed out the back that’s also full of books,” he adds. “I started to collect when I started work [in financial management] in 1960 at the Melbourne Town Hall, opposite Collins bookshop, and I used to go in there and I started buying books. And after a while, I worked out if you went to a secondhand shop, they were a lot cheaper.”

Mary-Jane Boughen, a Melbourne high-school teacher who has studied children’s literature, has a collection of picture books, particularly the works of Oliver Jeffers, Bob Graham, Raymond Briggs (“I’ve got everything”) and Maurice Sendak, author of the classic Where the Wild Things Are, in several languages. “I have four children. One went to Spain for a year, and he returned with the Spanish version. And then my other son went to Sweden and found me the Swedish version. I’ve got the Maori version, the German version. It’s interesting to look at it in other languages, compare the sound effects, and so on.” Oh, “and I’ve got all of J.D. Salinger’s works, not only Catcher in the Rye, which I’ve got six copies of, different covers. How could I part with one?”

Some collectors delight in mint signed editions, others in volumes that tell the story of the previous owners, crammed with bookmarks, handwritten notes (marginalia), forgotten bus tickets and other ephemera. “My favourites are the books where the author or an early owner has added something that enhances the book’s significance,” says Barbara Hince. “As an example, an 1878 two-volume study of Indigenous tribes in Victoria to which a man who published his own work on the same subject a decade later has added manuscript observations and opinions – books which transport you back to the time of their creation.”

Cookbooks are especially revealing, says Tim White: “An owner’s name, clippings, annotations, sometimes swear words, often explanatory notes or alternatives where they’ve scaled the recipe up or down or because grandfather doesn’t like sultanas, these tell unique stories. A perfect copy is important to understand the physical history of the book from a publishing, author-orientated process, but so is understanding its social context and how it’s actually been used.”

For Kevin Kennedy, a public servant from Melbourne’s Preston, much of it is about the thrill of the chase. His prey of choice is rare Australian publications, rare children’s books and modern first editions – think Tim Winton’s Cloud Street from 1991 – preferably scoured from op shops or garage sales, though he will cough up for (close to if not) market value on the internet if it’s otherwise impossible to complete a set. “But to be honest, I prefer just to go out and do the op shops. It’s a great feeling to go into an op shop and find a book that you know is, like, a $1000 book and you pay three bucks.”

It’s not about the money, though. “In the end, it doesn’t come down to that – I don’t think I’ll ever sell them.” Kennedy caught the bug while working in quirky inner-city bookshops in the early 1990s. “They were pretty cool, hip little places to work,” he recalls. “It was a different era back then. Writers and artists and all sorts of weird people would come in on the weekends and we’d sit there and smoke and drink coffee. I learnt very quickly what was worth money and what’s not. My love of collecting started there and I pretty much haven’t stopped.” Most of his collection is housed in a floor-to-ceiling bookcase that’s seven metres wide, dominating a room, “and there’s books in piles that I have to put away”. How many does he have today? “Honestly, I haven’t got a clue.”

Perhaps oddly, while some of the professionals in the book trade are collectors, others aren’t. “You can either be a collector or a seller, but you really can’t do both,” says Marshall Silver, owner of Sydney’s Rare Aviation Books, who estimates he has had between five and seven thousand volumes pass through his hands. “I avoid the temptation to buy it and hold it for myself because I feel it’s more important to make it available to customers who are starting their collections.”

Neither does Barbara Hince collect. “As a dealer, I can range across a greater number of subjects and genres, depending on what’s offered to me. I get satisfaction from finding the right home for a book. Also, as a merchant, I need cash-flow.” Conversely, Tim White has around 10,000 books of his own at home, not just food and wine but ancient travel guides, books in medieval Japanese, a huge collection of 1920s so-called “pocket books”, cheap volumes “designed for the person who’s getting in a third-class carriage on a railway to go to work and needs a book”. Not to mention his “sizeable” collection of books … about books. “I’m a bibliophile.”

Ultimately, says Amos Groth, a rewarding personal collection “isn’t curated overnight. It accumulates slowly. There are books bought because somebody recommended them, books inherited from parents, books from university, books associated with particular places or periods of our lives, books we’ve never quite got around to reading and books we’ve read so many times they’re falling apart. That’s why I don’t think the home library is disappearing. The information contained in books can certainly be digitised. The life contained in a collection can’t.”

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