It was in Wikipedia, so it must be true!

Surfing randomly through Wikipedia, I came upon an entry of interest to all Bibliophiles:

Bibliomania - a symptom of obsessive–compulsive disorder which involves the collecting or even hoarding of books to the point where social relations or health are damaged (fortunately Bibliomania is not to be confused with Bibliophilia, which is the usual love of books and is not considered a clinical psychological disorder - what a relief!)...

However there is worse:

Other abnormal behaviours involving books include book-eating (Bibliophagy), compulsive book-stealing (Bibliokleptomania), and book-burying (Bibliotaphy).

Have you ever stolen, buried, or eaten a book? Has your bibliophilia slid dangerously towards bibliomania? What treatment do you recommend for these disorders?

Let's have your feedback!

Buy a kindle?

Bibliophagy is abnormal? I thought that's how digests came about.

I thinks that I may have a slight and harmless strain of Bibli.

I have been known to smell the occasional book, tend to hoard and then thin them out. I will also hold a book to my heart if I have read and loved it.

As far as eating, stealing and burying, a very strange behavior, weird indeed.

I agree with the smell sensation, hazeljune... I often find that older printed books... say before circa 1970, in second hand bookshops have an amazing dried aged paper and ink smell when you first flick through them! (at last I think that's the smell)... and if you smell that musty smell when you first enter the shop itself, it often means you have found a treasure trove...

(oh and by the way, very droll, Pinkozcat, Binders...)

2..no kindle for me.

If I reach the stage of being unable to read the written word and hold a book I shall move on to audo!!

I am a great believer in "ever problem has a solution".

#6
Oh, come one, don't be such a curmudgeon! I have apps for both Kindle and Apple books on my iPad, and believe me they have their uses. Really big books like LoTR, which one may need to refer to when engaged in (usually pointless) discussion with people who have only seen the movie, become conveniently accessible. That said, I would never part with my hard cover copies, bought in 1968. They have a particular smell, which has lasted all these years and takes me back even earlier to when I first read it at the age of eleven.

I recently have had to spend a lot of time lying down pretty well flat with my feet elevated. Reading on the iPad was a lot more convenient than reading books. And we no longer have to take box of books away on holiday.

There are certainly a lot of books that wouldn't work as ebooks. Beautifully designed and illustrated, artefacts really, usually non-fiction and often reference works. We keep buying those and they're all over the place; culling the books is hard, even the old oxidised paperbacks, but I think we're psychologically normal! What has changed is that we now tend to buy a lot of novels as ebooks rather than paperbacks. (Downside is that you can't pass them on to somebody when you've finished.)