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Comment by ChickeNES | Hacker News Reader

> Are you a book lover?

> If you are, I suspect you already do this: when you travel abroad, you find yourself walking into a local bookstore.

> I do it everywhere, not only in Japan but also abroad. My shelves hold some Chinese and Russian books even though I cannot read a word of them. A bookstore is one of the best places to understand the local culture: what people there are curious about, what they worry about, what they love.

This sounds more like a fetish for physical books to me? I find it bizarre myself, books are just knowledge containers, if you can't read them...what's the point?

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Book covers, seeing what kinda stuff is being talked about, the general vibe of the space itself.

Lots of fun to be had wandering about, and unless you're looking at a thing where the script is really indecipherable you can kinda figure out what the topic du jour is even in foreign languages.

It's fun to look at book covers and imagine what's in the contents too.

> books are just knowledge containers

For you, that's the case. Books can also be a souvenir of a time and place or a person or even just an objet d'art.

One example is the family bible that's passed down from one generation to the next. That book might contain handwriting of your grand parents recording the birth of your mom. Surely you can see how that might be special to somebody?

> One example is the family bible that's passed down from one generation to the next. That book might contain handwriting of your grand parents recording the birth of your mom. Surely you can see how that might be special to somebody?

A personal artifact is a much different thing from some random book at a bookstore (personally, I'd rather explore the sights, take photographs, and make my own memories, not come back with someone else's). I also personally own thousands of books, they are a pain in the ass, and every day I consider liquidating most of them in favor of ebooks. I have too many to even consider treating them as art.

I do something similar with boardgames. I like to import foreign language games or pick them when traveling. They don’t need to be in English for me to enjoy and appreciate them. I have games from Germany, France, Spain, Japan, China, Brazil, and the UK.

My favorite is Kolejka, a Polish game about queuing at nearly empty stores during communism.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/85325/kolejka

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