One's collection comes to symbolize the contents of one's mind. Books read in childhood, in yearning adolescence, at college and in the first self-conscious years of adulthood travel along, often, with readers as they move from house to house. My mother's college texts, I remember, sat untouched in a corner of our country bookcase, radiating the satisfactions of Renaissance poetry and Greek drama while being slowly hollowed by silverfish. The decades since add their own drifts and strata of volumes read or half-read or intended to be read. Such books constitute a pledge of an infinite future, just as their brothers, already read but mostly forgotten, form an infinite resource of potential rereading, of new angles and insights on terrain where our footprints have all but vanished.
Books externalize our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.
Books as ballast. As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses. In comparison, any electronic text-delivery device would lack substance. Further, speaking of obsolescence, it would be outdated in a year and within 15 years as inoperable as my formerly treasured Wang word processor from the mid-80's.