I won’t pretend my reptilian brain doesn’t get a hit of pleasure from each edition that joins the hoard. But I also see my completism as an honest attempt to recover from the conviction that you know everything, or even anything. As in life, motifs and motivations in literature are notorious for moving in and out of focus as eras and perspectives change. To collect a single book — to follow it through generations and across borders, to consider the forms and languages in which other readers have presented it — is to commit your attention to its legacy. If you’re patient, the patterns that emerge are worth the wait.

Orwell argued that in varying proportions, four motives compel all writers: “to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood,” “to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed,” “to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity” and “to push the world in a certain direction.” That has always resonated with me as a writer; it now resonates with me as a collector. When you’re an amateur Orwell enthusiast and a recovering research chief, letting details of any kind slip through your fingers feels like a personal failure. In those contexts, all silence seems sinister.

Just over 25,000 copies of George Orwell’s “1984” were printed in the first pressing of its first British edition. One of those is mine; the woman who sold it to me swaddled it in paper and Bubble Wrap and advised me to keep it in the darkest corner of my home. I, in turn, was tempted to pull it out of my tote bag for strangers in the street. I took it for a walk across the Thames and through a climate protest in Oxford Circus. I took it to a pub and to a war correspondents’ club. By the time my husband and I flew home from London, it had become our version of a child’s stuffed animal. “I put George under my seat,” my husband whispered as we settled into the cabin. “I thought someone might squash him in the overhead bin.” Orwell wasn’t precious about his work, and he wanted it to be read widely. I think it would please him to know that the edition he lived to see is traveling, just as he did.