Other than personal satisfaction and an intelligent-looking bookshelf, why collect? There are significant, even world-changing, reasons to invest in book collecting. Perhaps that is why the most wealthy, powerful, and educated people have been doing it for centuries.
Book Collecting Decides What Goes Down In History
After his father died in 1757, Thomas Jefferson inherited the library of his father’s Shadwell Plantation. When that plantation house burned down in 1770, Jefferson mourned the loss of the books most of all. When he built his historic new home, Monticello, Jefferson amassed an even more impressive collection of nearly 10,000 books. After the British burned the Congressional Library in Washington during the War of 1812, Jefferson sold over 6,000 volumes from his collection to the Government, re-establishing the Library of Congress.
What Jefferson had chosen to collect and care for over the years were the books the Congress of the United States would use as a reference while establishing the laws of the newly founded country. Today, the Library of Congress is the largest library in the World.
Collecting Books Aids in Preservation
By buying and caring for books you love, you are maintaining them for future generations of collectors, buyers, and bibliophiles. Condition is vital in the trade of books, and a lovingly handled collection ensures that the texts will be available for the next crop of bibliophiles.
Books, by nature, are made up of materials that deteriorate – paper, leather, glue. Left alone, the ink and ideas on the pages quickly fade into history. But the ideas of the past represent human truths and concrete history that are important to save. Without books, what would we know about the Roman Empire, religion, The Renaissance, or the World Wars?
Read the full article: https://www.biblio.com/blog/2022/08/the-importance-of-book-collecting-five-world-changing-reasons-to-collect/
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