I love books. Not just the information in them, the books themselves. I love the smell of paper, the weight of a thick book, the feel of a cloth cover, the scraping of a page being turned, the little sensitive tingle I get in the tips of the fingers on my left hand as I slide it down the page, holding the book open.

Books are not ideas. Words are not the things they label.

There is (or was) a company called Books by the Pound where you could, well, purchase books by weight. They’d simply ship you a crate of books that weighed what you paid for, so you could decorate your faux trendy restaurant or coffee shop with books no one would ever read (and, in some cases, had never read) way up there on shelves no one could reach.

Books are not ideas.

Some folks love words for their own sake. I do. It only becomes a problem when they share their passion selfishly, with someone who doesn’t care or in the wrong setting. Lengthy pontification during a business meeting is almost always about the words, and not the ideas.

Words are not the things they label.

Most of us struggle when connecting abstracts with their concrete representations. If I say “write four” you’ll almost certainly scribe the symbol 4 when, in reality, the concept of four things carries more meaning than the symbol. Four people is very different from the symbols we use to communicate that phrase; 4 dollars, 4 hours, 4 dead, 4 births. All mean something very different from the symbols, the glyphs, the writing itself. Yet readers, listeners, often miss the meanings because we don’t instinctively ponder the difference between symbols, reality and perception.

Books are not ideas. Words are not the things they label.