On Bibliomania

“Desiderius Erasmus lived his happiest months from late 1507 into 1508 at the Venetian print-shop of Aldus Manutius. A peripatetic scholar, [he] had lived in Rotterdam and London, Basel and Paris, true to the dictum that where the humanist goes there is his home, but it was the smudgy, dirty, cacophonous, and chaotic shop on Calla della Chiesa near the filthy Piazza Sant’ Agostin that was heaven. For nine months, Erasmus spent his short nights in a modest dorm and his long days in the print shop, expanding on his collection of proverbs Adagiorum chiliades while Aldus proofread, craftsman carefully laying sets of print and rolling paper through the press... Using my own rudimentary arithmetic to arrive at an estimate of how many volumes I’ve collected over the past thirty years and I’ve arrived at around 3,000 books, which though paltry when compared to the vast hoard of the black-clad vampiric fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld’s 300,000, is within spitting distance of Ernest Hemingway (9,000), Thomas Jefferson (6,487), and Hannah Arendt (4,000). ‘I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library,’ wrote Jorge Luis Borges.”

Ed Simon - https://lithub.com/nothing-better-than-a-whole-lot-of-books-in-praise-of-bibliomania/. Needless to say I have a lot of books maybe somewhere between Jefferson and Arendt, along with a wife exceedingly tolerant of a form of bibliomania that only manifested itself after we wed.