sights and observations from the past month or so

collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationary store a key position. how many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches i undertook in pursuit of books! … now i am on the last half-emptied crate, and it is way past midnight. other thoughts fill me than the ones i am talking about — not thoughts but images, memories … for a collector — and i mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be — ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to things. not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.

walter benjamin