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My love of books, as it often does, starts with my parents. As kids, they read to me and my brothers and regularly took us to the library. Our house was full of books. We kids books about mythology, ecology, adventure, nonsense. We had a full set of encyclopedias and a continuous set of National Geographic magazines. We had atlases and oversized photo books about the world.
In elementary school, I had Ms. Rennebohm-Franz for first and second grade. In her classroom, she had an enormous library filled with all kinds of books. It was housed at kid level, along the floor. I remember the abundance of picture books on ecology the most. My favorite genre at the time was cookbooks. I would slink off to the back of the school library and just read recipes that I would never make. If it wasn't recipes, it was the magical and the spooky: ghosts, snakes, witches, fairies, Halloween, the unexplained, fantasy creatures.
In middle school and high school, I regularly visited the local used bookstore, Brused Books. Incredible selection, incredible prices. To this day it's my favorite bookstore. During that time, I mostly bought books on Wicca, cooking, Latin, creative self-help. They lived on a small shelf at my parents' house.
In high school and a few summers in college, I worked shelving books at the same library I had grown up visiting: Neill Public Library. I wrote a piece for the local paper about how the real stories in a library aren't the books, tHeY'rE tHe PeOpLe. A lot of books crossed my hands from a wide range of readers.
In college, I got a weird job helping a professor organize his library. I can't say I was much help: my skill was in ordering books with Dewey decimal stickers on their spine, not categorizing books I knew nothing about.
Okay, that's all to say: I love books. I love buying books. If I'm trying to sound fancy, I'll tell people I'm a collector. At this point, I've got over 550. They're almost all in my bedroom and they're almost all reference books filled with pictures. I'm building a library to help me build my game. The wealth of knowledge I've amassed doesn't come without a price. I've filled my bookshelves and stacks sit on the floor. It took two dozen boxes to move them all when I moved apartments.