On Loaning Books

"Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away."    Doug Coupland

It has been a great pleasure of mine to share my library with many other people. It has been part of my underlying justification for spending far too much money on books. One excuse for a fairly liberal book budget is that I just love books. But then many people love books and books do get to be onerous if you are moving all the time so there needs to be a greater justification for having books in hand and controlling their distribution. And so I've developed another one. My argument goes this way: I'll read the book and then let someone else read it which then in some way may elevate my status in their eyes (perhaps/perhaps not) but then also occasion a conversation between us over the book and thereby contribute to my own greater pleasure of talking about ideas and other things that matter. Yes it's still selfish and self-serving but it works for me.

Until now. The other day I was counting the cost of  loaning out books and then not getting them back. Some of the books I have loaned to others but have not had returned to me are as follows: the complete corpus of Soren Kierkegaard's philosophical works translated into English by Howard and Edna Hong, Walter Brueggemann's Genesis commentary in the Interpretation series, Eugene Peterson's memoir, Pastor, Rowan Williams' book of sermons, A Ray of Darkness, Stanley Hauerwas' The Cross-Shattered Church, and the list could go on. It reminds me of the 1st ed. vinyl pressing of the set Jesus Christ Superstar  by Rice and Webber which I bought while I was in High School. I gave it to a friend to listen to and never got it back. I still think about it.

Then there are the books you loan out and have returned to you in really bad shape. In one case, the person borrowing my Spiritual Friendship by Aelred of Rievaulx dropped it in a small pool of oil. It came back to me rather differently ornamented and accompanied with great apologies, but because it was out-of-print at the time, it could not be replaced and I had decided that perhaps the stains had their own particular beauty. And then I came across a quote from C.S. Lewis in which he says something to the effect that books loaned out and then returned with dog-ears, tears in pages or even damaged covers, will, in the grand scheme of things, emerge with jewels where the damages once were, and even more valuable than the books ever would have been if they had not been shared with others.

So, I continue to share my books, in spite of the losses I have already suffered and knowing that I am sure to suffer more. There is no greater pleasure than to be able to say to someone, "I have just the thing you should read. Here, I'll get it for you." Somehow, I think that that is what books were always about anyway.