What is a book worth?
What is the value of a book? Maybe in this instance it might be best to ask – how am I defining value.
Worth to an individual ? Absolute intrinsic value of the paper and ink? Hard to say.
Part of what a book’s worth makes me glad to be a bookseller because I look at books and realize the value of particular books to me and realize that I have walked this way and now others coming into my little book store are walking similar ways.
When I was a very young man (still in high school), I read a book in our high school library written by one Rene Descartes in which Descartes postulated the incredible idea that at some point in our lives we should place into doubt everything that we know and seek to prove to ourselves that the things which we believe are correct and true.
This hit me like a piano dropped on my head and made me start to think about why I believed all the things I believed. A fantastic idea – and it came from a book.
Growing older I now compare it to the feeling Keats must have felt upon first reading Chapman’s Homer.
This was an epiphany.