Audrey Golden

"I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood—it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of an­ticipation which these books arouse in a genuine collector.. . . . [W]hat I am really con­cerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection. If I do this by elaborating on the various ways of ac­quiring books, this is something entirely arbitrary. This or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of mem­ories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collec­tor's passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?" —Walter Benjamin, from Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting (1931)