Have you ever been in a warehouse where you’ve seen boxes and boxes of a book publish? I have worked in a warehouse that shipped out books to booksellers large and small. It was interesting to see the way books arrived. If it was a popular book then many boxes of it would arrive. If it was a niche book or a special order, then it might be in a big box full of many different books. It’s funny to see a box full of one book and to think about all the people who will be reading it. I liked thinking about who might be special ordering a book as well especially if it was something strange and esoteric like David Icke. I like collecting books though I haven’t lived in a house of my own for a while. So I realize that collecting books is like collecting anything else, a big pile of stuff.
When I worked at the place where I packed orders of publishers books into small packages that would be shipped to various booksellers around the country, I liked to think about the numbers of books and the numbers of people and all of the words that had been generated to be read. It’s interesting to me who will want to read something.
At the book wholesaler where I worked, there were weird hippie health books about being a fruitarian which meant you could only eat fruit. Some of the fruitarians were strict enough that they thought they should only eat fruit that had been dropped by a tree where they could see it. Supposedly if you became a fruitarian it was a normal thing for your body to develop big oozing sores because this meant you were cleansing. This seemed crazy to me and my friends but we still found the books about it to be endlessly interesting and hilarious to make fun of. I thought that if you were developing huge pus filled sores, it probably meant that since you were only eating fruit, you had nutritional deficiencies. The people who wrote the book on the other hand, thought it was healthy and natural. There were many different books on every different subject under the sun, from different publishers that were fun to look at and think about.
