Bibliophilia

Bibliophilia is the love of books; a bibliophile is a lover of books.

The classic bibliophile, such as Samuel Pepys, is one who loves to read, admire and collect books, often nurturing a large and specialised collection. By definition a bibliophile does not necessarily want to possess the books they love; an alternative would be to admire them in old libraries. However the bibliophile is usually an avid book collector, sometimes pursuing scholarship in the collection, sometimes putting form above content with an emphasis on old, rare, and expensive books, first editions, books with special or unusual bindings, autographed copies, etc.

The term bibliophile can also be applied to one who has an obsessive fondeness for books, perhaps amounting to bibliomania. This is most often seen in compulsive hoarders, identifiable by the fact that the number of unread books in their possession is continually increasing relative to the total number of books they possess; and read. Extreme bibliophilia may amount to a diagnosed psychological condition.

Bibliophilia can also apply to:

• technosceptics -- "the heretics, the mean-spirited killjoys of the information age" [1] -- who prefer the printed word, whether bound in leather or not bound at all, to hypertext or, more generally, digital and thus, as they see it, elusive and unreliable information.

• Very modern and totally compulsive readers, who have discovered that after reading for hours on the best and largest consumer market computer display screens, their eyes tend to grow extremely weary, forcing them to resort frequently to the use of printed books¹.

(¹ The books give them a much higher resolution than that available on top of the line monitors using rare computer display standards such as "WUXGA", and they can thus enjoy even more reading hours in a given day. These compulsive readers will probably abandon the printed book once the price of the IBM "Roentgen" displays (200 ppi giving 2560×2048 pixels on a 21" screen) and their eventual clones drop down in price by a factor of 10 or so. )

See also

• book collecting main article.
• -philia for other technical terms of obsession.

External Resource

• Bookseller World collectors resources, glossary of term, bibliographies etc