bibliomaniac

Museums, galleries and art institutions have not yet lost faith in high-quality print publications in this screened-out century, and even as venues for cultural debate keep shrinking — pour one out for Bookforum, the lively art-adjacent book review that shuttered this week — art publishing remains in fine fettle, with more titles every year than even the most committed bibliomaniac could peruse.

It’s a remnant of the vast private library of the 19th-century British bibliomaniac Thomas Phillipps — and, for the unprepared, a startling reveal akin to the first sight of Norman Bates’s mother in “Psycho.”

“OK, I’m a bibliomaniac — there’s your quote.”

Even as a child he was a bibliomaniac, spending his waking hours flipping pages “stiff as cartilage,” deciphering marginalia and cloistering himself in a reality of his own making.

Pertaining to a passion for books; relating to a bibliomaniac.