It is with a heavy heart that I must forsake the Saturday pleasure of reading the Review section from the Wall Street Journal and listening to the John Batchelor Show on podcast. It is not that they have been corrupting my politics, I’ve been a conservative by temperament since at least high school when I discovered that I had greater appreciation the Hamiltonian side of the Jefferson-Hamilton debates. Rather it is that they have been feeding my bibliomania.

Bibliomania is a psychological disorder first described by Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin in 1809. It is that malady that affects men (and it is almost always men) who are unable to pass a book monger without buying another book. There are several problems that arise when one suffers from bibliomania. One is the continual lack of bookshelf space. This adds to another: complaints from the spouse on the clutter of volumes in the house. It can do tremendous damage to the household finances as well. The greatest issue with bibliomania is that the bibliomaniac reads at an arithmetic rate while the volumes accumulate at a geometric rate.

It used to be that book stores were the great enabler of bibliomania. Particular offenders were Chaucer’s in Santa Barbara, Printer’s Inc. in Palo Alto (RIP), Holmes Books in Oakland (RIP). While Chaucer’s is still in business, Darwinian competition from the Internet has replaced book stores with Amazon.com and Books-a-million.com. Furthermore, unless you lived in a great international city like New York, London, or Amsterdam, it was difficult to find a concentration of specialty and antiquarian book vendors. The Internet and the dreaded addall.com search aggregator has opened up the world of specialty book vendors to my bibliomania. I can now find and acquire a copy of Paul Karge’s Raphaim from the late 19th century from a book seller in Amsterdam, and a long out of print volume on epee fencing from Berlin, from the comfort of my living room.

I am inquisitive my nature and am prone towards studying a subject monomaniacally for a period before moving on to another field to study. Walking my book-lined walls is evidence of this. Here are the 40 volumes of Freud, Jung, and Adler. There are the 60 volumes on the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua-2 Kings). Here are the collected works of Ray Bradbury. There are the 16 books by 19th and 20th century explores and hunters in Africa. Here is the complete works of Ian Fleming. There are the 50 volumes on Jewish mysticism.

The WSJ Review section is responsible for my longest running monomania to date. I read a lengthy cover essay by the diplomat Charles Hill on the value of the humanities to the practice of grand strategy, which sent me down a multi-year study of grand strategy based on the reading list and supplementary reading for the Brady Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, and more recently the acquisition of a Masters degree in International Relations at Troy University.

While engaged in a particular monomania, I am likely to be distracted by book reviews for books outside my area of study. Most recently, I bought a copy of Douglas Starr’s The Kill of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science based on an interview with the author on the John Batchelor Show. When will I read this book about the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes? Maybe I will get around to reading it a decade from now (that whole arithmetic-geometric rate problem again). Therefore, it has come time to cut ties with the book reviews.