The Book Disease: On Bibliomania

This really struck a nerve with me as a board gamer. There's a renaissance in board gaming at the moment, where new publications have tripled from about 1,000 a year to 3,000. Old, collectible games are increasing in value, and there are now speculators who invest in kickstarters to get possession of soon-to-be rare expansions that will shoot up in value once the game comes to market.

There's a growing buzz in the gaming community about all of this. People, myself included, are worried about the fact that we own dozens of games that we may likely never play, but we had to buy them because of fear of missing out (FOMO). Many people are refusing to buy some games altogether because they recognize that they are completionists who will have to obsessively-compulsively track down every hard-to-find discontinued expansion.

There are forums now discussion coping mechanisms for managing the compulsion to buy new games (no one feels like they are playing too many board games, just buying too many). Some people keep a ratio of games owned to games played and won't allow themselves to buy new games unless they've played at least 80% of the games in their collection. Others give themselves board game allowances, where they are allowed to purchase one or two games a month. It's really fascinating to watch, and I keep wondering how far this can go before the bubble bursts.

I would say that contemporary equivalent is data hoarding. There are people who have archives of various media, whether (audio)books, films, music, video games or programs in sizes of tens of TB or more. Of course they will never be able to consume the content, but what if they ever wanted/needed some small part of it? And it's not like it would be useful backup in case of SHTF/TEOTWAWKI scenario either, because the popular storage methods aren't very durable.

For those who wish to read about contemporary patients/vectors/what have you, The Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet and Books: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry are quickly read and worth it.

Help, I think reading this piece gave me bibliomania.

Is it still bibliomania if your criterium isn’t bindings or editions but scientific, historic and mathematical subject matter?