Why Build a Personal Library?

A personal library is, among other things, a map of where we’ve been, a track through time that helps us understand the way we’ve come. This is all the more so because books are very often the catalysts for the very turns and transitions to which they testify. “There are,” as legendary Johns Hopkins professor Richard Macksey once said, “little bits of yourself that are scattered around the library.”

Books trigger transformation in our lives, and keeping a copy allows us to access those moments for all sorts of reasons: self-exploration, renewed excitement, gratitude, ongoing curiosity, and more. You’ll never reread that old book for the first time, but revisiting a copy on your shelf can help you recapture a memory—just like finding an old photo or replaying a favorite song.

Anyone with a home library probably has some version of this. “Sometimes I stop in the center of my own home like a bird arrested in flight, entranced by the books that line my walls,” says actress and writer Leslie Kendall Dye. While her New York apartment is small, Dye has crammed the living room, hallway, closets, and bedroom with books.

If you’re looking to better understand yourself, look back at the books you’ve read. Assembling a personal library of whatever size is an act of self-revelation.

“No matter what a person studies,” says novelist Eugene Vodolazkin in Solovyov and Larionov, “above all he is studying himself. . . . Accidental topics do not exist.”

Richard Macksey, quoted above, moved into his Baltimore, Maryland, house in 1962. For the next fifty-seven years, he added to his personal library, finally hitting 51,000 volumes by the time of his death.

Do you ever marvel that you can pick up an idea first expressed in writing 2,500 years ago, try it on for size, and apply it to your life today? Books are disembodied teachers that speak across centuries and cover geographical distances we could never traverse in person.

Books represent agendas for living, creating, designing, and building. By assembling a personal library we’re creating an intellectual board of advisors, a committee of consultants that might include everyone from Aristotle to St. Augustine, Montaigne, and—who knows? You choose. It’s your library!

Raymond Chandler said, “If you liked a book, don’t meet the author.”