Why I am a Book Collector

‘My shelves are not storage. They are a biography.’

-David H. Headley on how books made a life

Most people assume collectors begin with confidence or expertise. I didn’t. I began with a feeling.

I did not become a book collector because I thought books would ever make me money. I became a collector because books made me feel.

I grew up in York. A city where history sits in the walls, where stone remembers every footstep. But my own childhood world was smaller. Ordinary. School, home, routine. A boy who felt more observer than participant. Somewhere in those years, I discovered that a book could take me somewhere else. That a book could speak to me in a voice quieter and kinder than anything I heard in the real world.

The first book that ever changed me was Roald Dahl’s Danny, the Champion of the World. I remember reading it and thinking, here is a child who matters. A child who can outthink adults. A child who is allowed to dream and scheme and love. That story taught me that I was not foolish to have big feelings. It taught me that love between father and son could be magic. It told me that imagination had value. I did not know it then, but that book planted the earliest seed of who I would become.

As a teenager, I found a sanctuary. Ken Spelman’s bookshop in Micklegate. A quiet doorway I would slip through as though crossing into another life. It smelled of paper and time. There were books stacked on the floors and tables. Nothing about it asked you to be anything except a reader. I would walk in and disappear. I would run my fingers along spines, choosing without being watched, without being asked to justify. That bookshop was the first place I felt entirely myself. I could walk through York feeling unsure, and walk through that doorway and feel chosen.

The first signed book I ever owned was one I bought myself. I remember the ache of wanting it. Not a gift. Not luck. I saw it. I chose it. I paid for it. In that moment I was not just buying paper. I was buying a version of myself I wanted to believe in. I was making a decision. I did not know it then, but it was the beginning of building a life in which I allowed myself to want things.

Long before I understood what a first edition was, I was already collecting. I would go through charity shops and feel as though I had found buried treasure. And I made mistakes. I bought books that I was sure were first editions, only to realise later that they were book club prints or reprints. It felt embarrassing, a little crushing, slightly funny in hindsight, and ultimately motivating. Those missteps were the tuition. They taught me to look more closely, to learn, to care. They helped me understand that collecting is not instinct alone. It is skill earned slowly.

Books began teaching me how to know myself. Through reading, I learned what I believed long before I could articulate belief. Through collecting, I learned that I was allowed to choose. People sometimes look at my shelves and assume they were built from confidence. The truth is that for a long time, they were built from hunger. A hunger to belong. A hunger to have a world that felt safe. A hunger to hold on to the stories that told me I was allowed to exist.

There were books that guided entire chapters of my life. When I was training to be a priest, I read Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. I sat with it and felt something break open inside me. Greene wrote of a man who was flawed, human, failing in all the ways he believed he should not. And it was on those pages I learned something that changed me. It is alright to be human. It is alright to fall. It is alright not to be perfect. That book gave me permission I did not know I needed. It allowed me to step away from who I thought I had to be and walk toward who I actually was.

When I opened Goldsboro, I did not do it to build a commercial engine. I did it because I wanted to create a room where readers could breathe. A space where a person could walk in and be surrounded by possibility. Where someone who grew up like me could walk through a door and feel that something belonged to them.

Books taught me that stories have their own lives. Early in Goldsboro’s history, I bought 100 copies of Mick Herron’s Down Cemetery Road. I believed in that novel. But belief does not always sell books. We could not move them. They went into a loft. Forgotten. Years later, Herron became a phenomenon. And those forgotten boxes became part of literary history. That experience taught me that sometimes belief is a long and private promise. Sometimes you hold on for years before the world decides to meet you.

C. J. Sansom taught me something else. When his first novel, Dissolution, came out, we could not get many copies signed. He was unwell. Events were few. It frustrated me. I wanted to give readers more. Years later, I visited him at his house and had the privilege of getting many of those early copies signed. I realised that scarcity is not always glamour or marketing. Sometimes scarcity is pain. Sometimes a signature is a small miracle. Sometimes value is born from a body that was struggling. It humbled me.

My shelves tell my story more accurately than any biography ever could. Early David, hunting through charity shops, excited by rarity because rarity felt like a reflection of worth. Middle David, standing in publishing rooms, collecting with strategy, trying to prove something, believing that a bigger collection meant a bigger identity. Present David, choosing slowly, choosing carefully, buying only the books that speak to the person he has fought to become.

People sometimes ask whether collecting is elitist or foolish. They ask about value, bubbles, economics. But I think of the world we live in. We stream our stories. We scroll through our lives. We consume without touch. Almost nothing we love exists in our hands anymore.

A book is something else entirely. A book is a promise. It is a physical object that says: I happened. You happened. This story happened. You are here.

The first time I sold a rare book because I needed money, I walked to the bank with the cash. I deposited it. I watched the balance shift. I knew I might never hold that book again. But I also felt something I did not expect. Permission. Permission to move forward. Selling felt like letting go of an old version of myself in order to walk into a new one. It taught me that possession is not the point. Becoming is the point.

There is a difference between possessing and curating. Possession is fear. Curating is vision. A possessor holds on because they worry they may lose something. A curator lets go because they know the story has finished. My shelves once held everything. Now they hold only what has earned its place. They are a biography. Each book is a sentence in the story of my life.

Books made me. They gave me windows when I thought I was facing walls. They gave me escape when I had none. They gave me community before I knew how to belong. Authors became friends long before I ever met them. Pages became footsteps toward a future I had not yet imagined.

Books gave me my voice. They gave me my purpose. They gave me the life I live today.

One day these books will outlive me. Someone else will open them. They will see a signature. A date. Possibly my name. They will know that someone cared. Someone chose this story once.

That is why I collect. That is who I am. And that is the return I value most.