I cannot go into a bookstore without buying two books. It’s like a curse. I will approach a bookstore and say to myself, "I'm just looking, I don't need more books,” and then walk out of there with two books under my arm. I own so many more books than I’ll ever read at this point—but one thing that’s made it at least easier to keep track of my growing library is my ritual of stamping my name inside them.
You see, last year I was on a date in the East Village with my husband, and he spotted a small, weird store and convinced me to follow him inside. Although I wasn’t sure it was open—according to their website, Casey Rubber Stamps keeps “East Village Artist Hours” which means they are often open late or at random times—once inside I felt like I had been transported into a kind of store that I used to only think existed in fiction. I was surrounded by rubber stamps of all kinds. Stamps of cats, typewriters, naked ladies, lightbulbs, letters, numbers, phrases, everything you could possibly want and more in the catalogue. The store itself was cramped and dusty, every inch of its surfaces covered in rubber stamps and their paraphernalia (ink pads, scratch paper, blank postcards). It was magic.
My husband and I knew we couldn’t leave Casey Rubber Stamp empty handed. So we both created custom stamps—another service they offer—for our growing shared library. The two of us haven’t sorted through all our books yet to know which ones came from him and which ones are mine, but at the very least we can stamp all our new purchases.
“Ex libris” is latin for “from the library of.” At Casey Rubber Stamps, you have the option to combine a selection of pre-made images that say “ex libris” with your own name, which they will put together in the store. While they’re not custom in that I’m sure someone else out there selected the same image as me, this ex libris stamp is mine, all mine.
My stamp is pretty simple, depicting a naked witch (or I like to imagine) leaping from the pages of a book above my name in a gothic script. Every new book I buy now feels more acutely mine. I have a library, not just a series of piles of unread books. And if I ever get rid of these books, they’ll have a history—they came from my collection and now belong to someone else’s.
And if I must live surrounded by stamps of books I’ve half finished or will never start, at the very least I have made them interactive in some small way. Sitting down with a pile of new books and stamping them with my name until my fingers are covered in ink is so comforting. It’s almost as good as actually reading them.
