Packing My Library

I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood—it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation—which these books arouse in a genuine collector. For such a man is speaking to you, and on closer scrutiny he proves to be speaking only about himself.

—Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”

A collection, Walter Benjamin suggests, is nothing less than an identity. A character demonstrates the point in Stephen Frears’s film High Fidelity, based on Nick Hornby’s novel. After a bad breakup, John Cusack’s eerily accurate record-collector protagonist reorganizes his collection, not alphabetically or chronologically, but autobiographically.

“I can tell you how I got from Deep Purple to Howlin’ Wolf in just twenty-five moves,” Cusack tells a friend who visits him midway through the project. “If I want to find the song ‘Landslide,’ by Fleetwood Mac, I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the fall of 1983, but didn’t give it to them for personal reasons.”

As I write this, my parents are packing up everything in their house for storage. They’ve decided to spend their last few years before retirement living and working in Karachi, Pakistan, where they were both born. I took a bus from New York to Pennsylvania to do my part, as my brother would from California later in the summer. My mother had already warned me that my primary contribution would be packing my library.

My own library does not consist of books or records, but the less fashionable medium of CDs, having been initiated after the death of vinyl and before its alleged rebirth. I built up the collection feverishly in my youth, no small feat in the cultural vacuum of State College, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. Its growth tapered off only when, in my mid-twenties, I moved into a sardine can in Brooklyn too small to hold it. The larger part of it lay scattered through my childhood bedroom—in the bookcase, in the closet, in milk crates and obsolete IKEA containers on the floor—until I returned earlier this year to put it in order. When laid out together, the CDs attain a volume too large to fit in the trunk of a car.

In Walter Benjamin’s talk on book collecting, occasioned by a relocation of his own library, he notes the kinds of knowledge that preoccupy the collector—trivia,...