I have somewhat of a problem… I have the collectors itch. I used to collect flags, then it was old military gear, and nowadays I collect vinyl records, books, and digital media. I collect, broadly speaking, information. The idea that I am curating my own library of music, books, essays, and various other media really appeals to me. I love the feeling that I have so much knowledge, history, and art at my fingertips, but in a different way from that of simply having access to the Internet. The major difference is that I physically own and control the information. Whether it is in digital or physical form, I can manipulate it, store it, and use it however I like without fear that the hosting platform may suddenly vanish, or that a book will go out of print and be unobtainable. I suppose I can come up with all sorts of reasons for collecting information, and try to justify why you too should do so, but that’s not really my goal here. I simply enjoy it. Today I'll be looking at written media specifically.
I first started collecting books either late in middle school or in my freshman year of high school. The catalyst for my book-buying was discovering that there was a Half Price Books in Des Moines. I started my collection almost solely with national security, military history, and nuclear weapons books, most of which I still own today. I first bought the book “15 Minutes: General Curtis LeMay and the Countdown to Nuclear Annihilation” in eighth grade and read and reread it multiple times. I was already interested in nuclear technologies, but having access to affordable second hand copies of books on the topic really helped support my curiosity. As the years progressed, I almost solely got my books from Half Price Books, only occasionally picking up one or two from Amazon.
Fast forward to college and I still maintained an interest in national security and nuclear issues, but my knowledge base had expanded to also include math, physics, and engineering. In 2022 I was particularly wrapped up in this personal project of mine researching modern nuclear weapons policy and physics. It was around this time I actually started to use the university library for the resource that it was. I would go in and pick out a few books that seemed interesting, read some bits of them, read a couple all the way through, and then put some back if they weren’t what I’d thought. This allowed me to also pick out books that I thought I’d like to own and test drive them before making the commitment. This was a great lesson to learn, as it would help me later on down the line to find better resources to complement the courses I was taking. I also started to collect digital records of things. For example, I saved the entirety of the Nuclear Weapons Archive [LINK] to my hard drive by printing the pages as PDFs so that I could always have access to the wealth of information, even if the web hosting lapsed or the author took it down. Another example is the plethora of government and NGO publications and essays you can find online. I would read and annotate essays from people like Brad Roberts, a nuclear security expert, or publications from the national labs about technologies I was interested in. All of this I would save on a hard drive and make a backup copy of so I could always go back and relearn the content.
My brother introduced me to Thriftbooks, a website for buying second hand books, around this time. Something inspired me to start picking up books about classes I was taking so I could have a hard copy and maybe get a different take on a topic. For instance, I got an older edition of the thermodynamics textbook I was learning from, just so I could have it right there next to my desk as reference. The idea of having reference material was itself a big motivator. I liked to be able to turn my chair and reach over to my bookshelf and grab a book about whatever I was working on and get an answer to my question, or maybe see a different explanation/derivation of some mathematical result. Plus, people aren’t exactly clamoring for old editions of math, engineering, and physics textbooks, so they were too cheap to pass up! Then I moved past just having books for the courses I was taking and instead started to look ahead and pick up a book or two about a topic I wanted to learn. I hoped that by having it there and readily accessible it would motivate me to learn about the topic. This turned out to be true to some extent, and a little hopeful in other ways. It allowed me to quickly read up on a topic I was curious about, but I found that taking the time to work through a whole textbook and teach myself a subject, say, quantum mechanics, was too much of a commitment while already a full-time student. Nonetheless, I still found a lot of value in having mini-libraries dedicated to certain subjects that I would repeatedly come back to. For instance, I love mathematical analysis and have accumulated a whole three-shelf bookcase worth of analysis books. This is like a little mini-library for me to explore whenever I get the itch to read some math.
I have a lot of distrust for hosted media, and so it is nice to know that no matter what happens to the Internet, or how we all share information with one another, I will still have access to the information that matters to me and I can continue my education or use what I’ve learned to create new things.