There has GOT to be an official name for this...

Like all book lovers, we like to buy and own some of our favourite books. I, however, have certain idiosyncrasies when it comes to books. It drives my friends and relatives nuts, but a small pool of bibliophiles understand :) There must be some kind of medical term to such obsessions, I feel.

1. If my books belong to some kind of series, they MUST be of the same publishing company.

Let the pictures explain.

Harry Potter from different publishers, all over the world. 

My books cannot jump from publisher to publisher. Therefore I can't have Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in Scholastic and then Chamber of Secrets in Bloomsbury (I cringe as I think of it. Actually, that is what happened with my book.)

This is not fine. I think I need to go and get the replacement soon because I heard Scholastic is releasing a new print *gasp*


This is fine.

Even manga has to be (as far as possible) from the same publisher. However, I'm not extremely particular. Maybe it's because the covers are still quite similar. Just that one uses Simplified Chinese while the other uses Traditional Chinese.

2. I hate broken book spines.
This one really drives my sisters insane. They use it as an excuse to explain why they don't like to read even though their little sister has so many. I can't exactly blame them. I get really nervous when they open the book and bend the spine. It was because of this stupid obssession that I feel so torn between wanting my friends and families to read my favourite books and keeping the books to myself so that they remain nice and pristine.

Then again, if you've seen my books, the pages are quite yellow, and I don't really mind. Some people, I heard, keep the book in the original shrinkwrap that the book came in. Hurhur. I'm not THAT diligent enough to keep up that maintenance.

3. I can't stop buying books, even though I have too many unread books on my shelf.
Every biblophile identifies with this, maybe 70% of them. I am not one to browse the library often, I'm not exactly sure why, but I suspect it's because the library does not have the variety and exoticness that I wanted as compared to Kinokuniya. As the years went by, the habit stuck and I ended up buying books from Kinokuniya. Therefore, sometimes there are books that I bought that I didn't really like, for example, Coraline (review here!) and even the Eon/Eona series (review).

The number of books that I buy have dropped comparatively as compared to when I was younger. Then again, when I was younger, I read thinner books so...

That's all the book-related idiosyncrasies that I have. If you ask me, I don't have very particular pet peeves or weird stuff. I don't find the need to sniff the pages of a new book, or arrange them in any particular order. Wait, I DO arrange them to some kind of order, but it's not very systematic. Apart from a very particular obsession with nice, smooth book spines and a compulsive book buying disorder, I consider myself quite a normal bookworm.

What do you think?

Pictures taken from:
Harry Potter with different printing
Old Kingdom trilogy (Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen)