MIND MOVES: Whenever there is a book launch, there gathers a congregation of people in that bookshop who are instantaneously united in shared possessive and obsessive love of books.
This manifests itself in their compassionate acceptance of each other's eccentricities. They understand the urge to sidle along shelves, seeking sightings of old friends or the possibility of new literary acquaintances hidden among them.
They see no aberration in holding a book in gentle adulation, laying hands lovingly upon its cover, opening its pages to turn them with individual idolisation as familiar words are scanned. They recognise the need to murmur well-known stanzas; to repeat these cantos of childhood; revelations of adolescence; source of adult illumination; and ecstasy of older age.
Book lovers understand the lifelong odyssey of edification that is the printed word, because they are engaged in this paradoxical quest: seeking the ineffable in the word, wisdom in the written and meaning by communing with many other minds.
Bibliophiles appreciate that in a bookshop crowded with their kind, there will be more greedy glances towards the books than towards the complementary food and wine. For books are nurture, elixir, inebriant and sustenance for those who love them. Without them, the mind is parched and the soul declines.
There is an excitement among book-lovers at a book launch. This is the birth of a new "edition" to what is the written. Bibliophiles gather to congratulate and celebrate those who conceived the story, germinated the ideas, laboured in its delivery and now launch this literary life into the world.
Celebrating books is more than understanding the power of prose, the educative potential and imaginative transformation of reading. Readers know the excitement of beginning a new book: accompanying new friends through lives, times, experiences and possibilities that the world outside that book might never give. We live alternative life times within the written world.
Readers comprehend the consolation found in characters who share their existential angst, their inexplicable emotions or irrational ruminations in this indecipherable life. They know that reading a book means entering a relationship: being ready to appreciate what it wishes to reveal, patient as its narrative unfolds and faithful to its final word.
In fact, what causes most readers' reluctance to turn those closing pages in a book is the rupture of relationship, eviction from the fictional life, grief at the loss of those characters from whose future lives one is being excluded ever more. There is the sense of abandoning or being forsaken by good friends, those who have excited curiosity, anger, awe, sympathy, ardour and admiration. All are now gone.
Stories are often told about our much-loved recently deceased novelist John McGahern who as a child remained so absorbed when reading, that only extreme measures by his sisters, such as removing the chair upon which he sat, were sufficient to, as he put it, "wake out of the book".
Readers know that experience of being elsewhere with a book, of turning that last page and being disoriented, of straddling two worlds: unwilling to leave one to re-enter the other?
Our books are precious things. Many people would give away all their possessions rather than lend a favourite book. Who has not panicked at the possibility of entrusting a valued volume to the care and custody of another? Who has not witnessed the cruel removal of a copy from its cradle in the bookcase, leaving a gaping space in place of that book's rightful abode? In the words of Charles Lamb, English essayist and critic, borrowers of books are "mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes". But Lamb misses the emotional point - the bibliophile's fear the beloved book may be ill treated, and return to its owner with dog-eared accusation that it was ever released into such irreverent care.
Indeed, friendship may be measured by the willingness of friends to lend each other books and the zenith of friendship with bibliophiles is reached when they voluntarily reach into their own bookshelves to suggest a book to read.
Author Faddiman in Ex Libris recounts how after several years of marriage, she and her husband having lived together, loved together and had a child together, dared to enter into a marital act of far greater intimacy than any in which they had previously engaged. That was to share and divide their individual libraries and to amalgamate their books. The climax of this act of ultimate commitment was reached when they agreed to discard some duplicates. For love between bibliophilic spouses must surely be when they relinquish a favourite book.
But the definitive diagnosis of bibliophilia is the behaviour of the bibliophile deprived of any reading matter. It is then the addiction attains its most acute and florid form. Travelling book lovers, who have found themselves in hotel rooms late at night without their books, recount regression to reading of the local telephone directory. Admissions of reading cereal boxes at breakfast time have also been recorded.
Should these symptoms sound familiar, you are a true bibliophile - a condition for which, fortunately, there is no cure.
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital Fairview.