From Llewellyn Hinkes and The Morning News, an exploration of books and other physical media as fetish objects.

Not a groundbreaking idea, but a timely one given the emphasis on collecting in the Goldbarth interview I posted earlier. (Not to mention the recent release of the larger, more expensive Kindle).

The trouble is that maintaining a physical collection is expensive and bulky. There’s just too much out there in the world. Even after pruning the treasury down to only those records and books of great personal importance, you can still be saddled with mountainous stacks to maintain. The convenience of digital deep storage is hard to deny. Fewer people are willing to make the sacrifice of cost and convenience for the impracticality of flipping sides, changing needles, and hauling thousands of pounds of paper and plastic when they move in exchange for better sound quality, musty paper, and gatefold album art. But what if you don’t care about actually owning your fetish? That is, what if true fetishism had little to do with possession, but instead was more of a compulsion to ensure that those things you find precious and holy are preserved and treated with dignity?