So the other day, I’m staring at my bookshelf, deciding which book to re-read, and something just feels…wrong.  Like, a nice middle-aged suburban couple are standing against the wall at a Fall Out Boy show. Except, replace Fall Out Boy with something edgier.  There, that’s it.  So, I’m looking at the books and wondering.  I’m singing the sesame street song “three of these things belong together, three of these things are kind of the same…”  And it hits me.  The Name of the Wind, The Lovely Bones,  American Gods… they’re all great books, except you wouldn’t know it because they’re *gasp* mass market paperbacks.  I know-  who cares, right?  Apparently, I do.

In case the the term mass market paperback is a foreign one to you, let me explain.  You know the racks of paperbacks at the grocery store?  At the airport?  The small books- that either have a shirtless Fabio embracing a swooning maiden, or have the fancy scrawling gold lettering- or both.  Those.  The books that, when I’m book shopping at a thrift store, I don’t even glance at because I assume they’re terrible.

So what do I do with this incongruence?  Simple.  I rush over to the computer with the mass market paperbacks in hand and I start making requests on paperbackswap.com.  I put in a request for a replacement copy of each, except in a trade paperback or hardcover or anything other than the ones in my hand.

Then, to top it off, I start to get a little particular about my Harry Potter books.  I have paperbacks of the first six, hardcover of the seventh.  “well, that’s not very symmetrical” I say to myself and put in a request for hardcovers of the first six.  A while back, I gave away the first book in the Midnighters series, and now I want it back to fill out the set.  Unfortunately, I can’t find one with a matching cover.

What I want is for my bookshelf to look…intentional.  Not like a haphazard hodgepodge of books scraped from the bottoms of many odd barrels, but like a book collection.  In my natural disaster of a home, I want one little corner of stuff that looks like I actually meant for it to be there.

So there it is: my version of being a book snob in two parts.  I no longer want to litter my shelf with mass market paperbacks, and I have decided to try and create a cohesive and attractive book collection.  It could be worse, right?