My (semi)Portable Library

Hello readers, my name is Connie Hatzikalimnios (pronounced Smith) and I’m writing to you from Lancaster, Pennsylvania USA, my hometown and that of none other than Tango Media’s design director, Alicia Freile.

Alicia and I grew up together.  We met during an all-elementary choir recital and immediately bonded when we discovered that each of us on separate occasions and at different schools had managed to vomit (involuntarily) on the same unappreciative principal.  We’ve remained friends ever since, even after her sojourn across the world to Sydney, Australia, thanks in large part to the Internet.  For the past year I have been freelancing as an image researcher for Tango Media.  I’ve enjoyed watching Alicia’s business grow, and I’m happy to be a small part of that.  When she asked me to contribute posts to the Tango Media Blog, I was thrilled.

I’m a book collector.  I enjoy reading printed matter of all kinds – magazines, auction catalogues, newspapers – but what surround me in every room of my home are books.  I am not opposed to digital media, I like having access to multiple online news sources at my fingertips simultaneously.  I’ve read eBooks, I follow blogs and I participate on social networking sites.  But I will always maintain that nothing can replace a book in my hand.  I love the way books feel, I love the way they smell and the way they stimulate and soothe.  They’re my security blanket.

And so through the years, my slightly compulsive acquisition of all kinds of books has amounted to a modest library that travels with me wherever I move.  Since college, I’ve packed my books carefully in boxes and transported them to new apartments in Washington, DC, Virginia and New York.  With each move, the number of books (and boxes) has increased, but I have never really minded packing and lifting and hauling them to their new home.  I have never considered them a burden… until now, that is.

I recently moved into a new apartment, and for the first time I left the majority of my books in their moving boxes for months.  Other than some cookbooks and paperbacks, I had no desire to unpack, shelve or read them until a few weeks ago.  But now that the unpacking is full steam ahead, and my books surround me once again in every room, I have begun to rethink my hold on them and their hold on me.  As I revisit and reorganize my collection, I hope you’ll join me for the ride and all of its detours.