Every other year, Harvard University awards the Philip Hofer Prize to the student with the best book or art collection. This year William Pannapacker, a doctoral student in the history of American civilization, took second place (worth $1,000) for his collection of some 3,000 books by 19th-century American authors. Pannapacker told the Harvard University Gazette that he will probably never read most of the volumes, but needed them anyway, to round out the collection. Indeed, his assortment includes six rare editions of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and more than 100 biographies and commentaries on the poet-more than even a grad student could stomach. "Once you get so far into it, it's hard to get out," Pannapacker said. "After buying 100 volumes, it's hard not to buy those next few volumes."

When I was a graduate student at MIT, I worked part-time as an antiquarian bookseller's assistant. The experience taught me that Pannapacker has plenty of fellow addicts. They can be amateur collectors such as the late industrialist Bern Dibner, whose personal library of 40,000 volumes on the history of science and technology moved to MIT in 1993. They can be professionals who buy and sell books about narrow subjects (architecture, landscaping and fishing were my employer's specialties). Or they can be elite, acquisitive institutions such as Harvard, which adds hundreds of books a day to its academic libraries, already the planet's largest. Book collecting, in other words, is hardly an unusual or new phenomenon. Books have always existed not merely to be read, but to be possessed.