I'm married to a librarian. From a young age, he found joy in organizing and reorganizing anything he could find, including his Matchbox cars and baseball cards. Especially his baseball cards. He had dozens of them, and now, at nearly 30, he has hundreds. He doesn't collect them for their monetary value; instead he collects them simply to be able to keep current with the cards he has, and to be able to better organize his teams.
This same personality trait caused us to spend two hours one evening pulling all of our books off their shelves (we own a lot of them; we were both English majors in college), organizing them according to genre, and then alphabetically by the author's last name. We even started putting them into an online personal library program, and stopped just short of printing out our own Library of Congress labels to put on the book spines.
That is why places like Earthlight Books, a used book shop at the east end of Main Street in Walla Walla, are dangerous places for us to visit. This shop is a popular haunt for many people I know; it practically whispers their name anytime they're near downtown, and, like a true magical entity, Earthlight Books is difficult to refuse.
