People say that a book you can't find doesn't exist

I recall that for a while, even though the situation was so desperate, Brauer spent all his time bringing his card index up to date. He was finding it increasingly hard to find the books he was looking for. People say that a book you can't find doesn't exist. ... Classifying twenty thousand volumes is no easy matter. Not only do you have to have a strict respect for order - an almost superhuman respect, I would say - but you need a method and time to devote to the thankless task of cataloging works whose meaning is very different from the numbers you use to identify them.

C.M. Dominguez, tr. P. Sis, The house of paper (2004), 48-9

It is often much harder to get rid of books than it is to acquire them

It is often much harder to get rid of books than it is to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witness to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there it is part of us, I have notices that many people make a note of the day, month,, and year that they read a book; they build up a secret calendar. Others, before lending one, write their name on the flyleaf, note whom they lent it to in an address book, and add the date. I have known book owners who stamp them or slip a card between their pages the way they do in public libraries. Nobody wants to mislay a book. We prefer to lose a ring, a watch, an umbrella, rather than a book whose pages we will never read again, but which retains, just in the sound of its title, a remote and perhaps long-lost emotion.

C.M. Dominguez, tr. P. Sis, The house of paper (2004), 14