I’ve been struggling with e-books lately. I keep thinking I should go ahead and join the e-book revolution, just as I have with music and photography and so much else, but I just can’t get into it. I have read e-books, but I still prefer traditional, printed books, for any number of reasons. Certainly one of them is their beauty as objects. That’s one of the reasons I love Leah Price’s book “Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books.” This is a beautiful book, and it’s about, in part, the beauty of books, and the writers who love them. The book puts the spotlight on the personal libraries of 13 novelists, with close-up photos of their shelves. Why do I love (printed) books? This book says it all.
ALLAN HOFFMAN 
i’m so happy to read that someone in your generation is not in love with ebooks … i thought it was the “fogey” in me, but there’s a certain sterility and homogeneity about them, among other reasons. i enjoy the anticipation of the title page, the dedication, browsing the chapter titles (and doing the math to compute the average length of a chapter in real pages!) … and when i think back to old favorites, often the image of the cover comes to mind. the book that you recommend sounds promising!
friend in nevada