“When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.”
Desiderius Erasmus

I love to buy books.  When my house finally sinks into the North Texas clay, it will be from the weight of books.  Were I win the lottery, a large portion of it would go toward building a library room and filling it...  Even when I finally get a Kindle, I will never completely divest myself of good old paper books.

In the original Star Trek series, I would be the curmudgeonly lawyer who defends James Kirk in "Court Martial".  The one who lovingly keeps books around even though the entire literary compilation of humankind is contained on one of those cheesy plastic "clipboards" the buxom blonde ensigns are always carrying :)

But what I don't like is to pay full price for a book.  Books have gotten outrageously expensive, unless they are basic trade paperbacks.  And if you need any kind of specialty book, you are going to pay out the nose....

Which means that one of my absolute favorite places in the entire universe is Half-Price Books.  I can spend hours there.   I especially like the clearance sections, where I might pick up 5 or 6 good books for 5 bucks.  The problem with Half-Price, though, is that you never know what you might find when you go there.  It is not a store conducive to the search for a particular book.

And, therefore, when it happens that way, it really is a joy for a bibliophile!

I recently posted that I have begun to have a renewed interest in writing poetry, but that I wanted to write old-fashioned metrical forms rather than the free verse that I learned growing up.  I have struggled, however, to gain some traction in this endeavor.  There is a great book that I wanted that would help me with the various forms, but it is more money than I wanted to spend.

And then I found, at Half-Price, not that book, but an even better book that provides very detailed instructions and guidance on writing poetic forms, helping with the complicated matter of meter, which is what I struggle with the most.  And so I ended up getting an even better book for about 1/4 of the price of the book I was originally seeking!

For someone who loves to find book bargains, it doesn't get much better than that!

Today I did something that any reasonable person would consider benign and innocuous.  I switched my "home library"!   Allow me to explain:  I am a frequent patron of the one of the local library systems, and as one might easily guess, I use their internet-based features quite frequently.    The internet tools they provide allow me the ability to manage the items I have checked out, search for new items, and have them placed on hold under my name.   Then I simply walk in to the "holds" area, which is conveniently located near the front, pull my items, and I'm checked out in minutes.

Part of the process requires you to select a "home library"  It;s the branch where all your holds will be sent for pickup.  For the last 2-3 years, I have been "homed" out of one particular branch that is located along a major freeway of my commute.  Now that I work at a different place, and I recently decided not to use that freeway anymore to avoid the toll fees, I decided that another branch of the library would be slightly more convenient... so today I asked a librarian to change my "home library".

Benign and innocuous.  One could hardly think of something more definitive of those terms.  The phrase "no big deal" comes to mind.

So, why did a feel a small twinge of guilt as I made this change?  Make no mistake, it was by no means a crippling sense of guilt, but an honest self-examination proved it to be extant nonetheless.    Granted, we are creatures of habit, and I had been patronizing this one particular branch for several years.. sometimes stopping by multiple times per week on the way home.   I recognized most of the library staff, and I like to think that some of them knew me as well-- especially after waltzing into the library in my full motorcycle gear a few times!

I've never lived in a real urban environment, but I imagine that the change I made today would be like changing hot dog vendors or newsstands in New York or D.C.  In my own little way, I had built a brand loyalty with this particular branch and some of its librarians, and I felt a little guilty abandoning them on the altar of convenience (or to the extortion of $4.00 gasoline!)

In the grand scheme of things, this was certainly nothing to get one's knickers in a knot over... but I was fascinated that such a simple thing could cause such feelings.   The human psyche is a wonderfully complicated and mysterious thing....