Some people love ice cream. Some people love video games. Some people love alcohol and drugs. We love books.

Well, I know I do.

I grew up surrounded by a large collection of books and by my dad’s full set of twenty volumes of the original Encyclopedia Britannica. It was my Google. There was no Internet then, or, at any rate, no Wikipedia yet. (And nothing against Wikipedia, but the old-style Britannica was something else).

I still love the physical aspect of paper books, and I prefer to read in the paper format whenever I can. Which means, most times except when I am travelling. I do love the practicality and malleability of e-books, but as physical objects, there’s nothing like a paper book.

Of course, paper books occupy space. And if you move or travel constantly, as I did in the last ten years of my life, then you cannot carry them with you at all times. Unfortunately, I had to get rid of an awful lot of books in my life, some of them books that I liked very much. Well, not really “get rid” – they were not thrown in the trash or burned, I couldn’t possibly do that. They were given away to friends or donated to libraries, so there’s the hope that the same old books will give joy to others the same way they gave me.

I hope you love books too. I hope you love the books that we publish, especially. I hope you buy them all. And if one day you need to move and can’t carry all of them with you, give them to a friend or donate them to a library.