For the Love of It
David Ford and His Passion for Book Collecting
“There’s a mania part to it for sure.” — David Ford
“You had how many books?”
“20,000.”
I stare at him from across the café table, half convinced I misheard.
“Where did you keep them?”
“We had a book locker,” David Ford says, as if that was the most normal thing in the world. He takes a sip of his mango smoothie, looking effortlessly cool in a white t-shirt, tattoos running down his arms.
Ford and I first connected at Meraki, the jiu-jitsu academy in Los Angeles we both go to. One day after training we got onto the topic of passion. I mentioned that I study it; he mentioned rare books. That’s when I knew we had to talk.
Ford collects books — not just any books, but rare, obscure, impossible-to-find books. He seeks out every version of a title: first editions, advance copies, signed copies, and even test prints released by the publisher. And yet, you won’t find him talking about them on social media. He doesn’t have a website. Google his name and “rare books,” and you’ll get nothing.
He has spent decades obsessively searching, acquiring, and cataloging books for no other reason than sheer love. Not for money. Not for fame. Just because he can’t imagine life without them.
I ask him how it all started — how does someone even get into book collecting?
Like many passions, it started with a moment of luck and a mentor. In grad school, Ford had an English professor who was obsessed with a rare Jack Kerouac essay but had lost his copy. “If anyone can find it,” he told the class, “I’ll give them an A.”
This was long before the internet. No searchable databases. Just luck and intuition. A few days later, Ford was walking to class when something caught his eye. A street vendor had the exact same essay — right there on a postcard.
“I was just so incredulous,” he says. “I was like, ‘This could not literally be the thing he was talking about, right?” But it was. And the satisfaction he felt was unlike anything else.
That moment lit the spark — but the passion didn’t fully take hold right away. Ford finished school but soon hit hard times and battled addiction. Knowing something needed to change, he left New York for Minnesota to get sober.
That’s when everything clicked. As part of his recovery, he took what was supposed to be just another job — but it turned out to be at one of the top rare booksellers in Minneapolis. Suddenly, he was surrounded by first editions, signed copies, and hidden gems, watching collectors hunt for the perfect book.
“That was a front row seat to seeing amazing books,” he says.
Ford had always loved books, but during this time, he fell in love with the chase — the collecting, the hunt. It brought him back to that first Kerouac search in college.
“A big part of book collecting is the treasure hunt,” he says. “The sense of discovery.”
But collecting is more than just the thrill of the find — it’s also about completion. For Ford, much like Louis Picone’s love of finishing lists, the project itself becomes the goal. Over the years, he’s gone through many phases, from tracking down every edition of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (including a copy from O’Brien’s own library) to collecting surf photography books after falling in love with surfing. Later, he became obsessed with finding every issue of McSweeney’s and first editions from Granta’s “20 Best Young Novelists” lists. And then there were books about books — detective fiction featuring booksellers as protagonists, old rare book catalogs, anything that deepened his understanding of the world he’d immersed himself in.
“There’s a level of geekiness,” he admits. “A sense of scratching that itch.”
And because rare book collecting flies under the radar, there’s also the thrill of getting a steal. Sometimes, Ford walks into a bookstore and finds a book he’s been searching for — marked at a fraction of its real value because the seller had no idea how rare it was.
Like the time he and his wife, Maggie, stumbled across a Chuck Klosterman book inscribed with a personal note to Bob Dylan, marked for less than $20 at a library sale in Santa Barbara. (He showed me the book — the inscription still intact.)
Ford’s obsession with books went beyond collecting — at one point, he even started making his own. He dabbled in bookmaking, a meticulous process that requires obsessive attention to detail, from hand-selecting materials to working with fine press printers. For a while, he also sold books, but the real joy for him was never in selling — it was in the hunt. The thrill of finding something rare, something unexpected.
At one point, that thrill led to 20,000 books stored in a book locker just miles from his home.
But passions evolve. Two years ago, Ford and his wife decided it was time to let go — just a little.
"They’d just been sitting there," he says. "It just seemed time."
Maybe someone else could find joy in the books that had come to mean so much to them both.
Packing up was unexpectedly emotional. As they sifted through the books, memories surfaced.
"I could remember where I got so many of them — this library sale, that moment in life. It was like a memory palace — where each book held a place in time," he says. But what made it even more meaningful was sharing that obsession with someone he loved.
Now, with a leaner collection of around a thousand books, still hundreds more than most people have, Ford is still adding to it.
"There are stacks of books in the house — and they’re always growing," he says, laughing. "Even after selling the book locker, we’re always going to library sales and buying new books. It’s kind of never-ending."
Ford’s story is a reminder that passion doesn’t have to be practical to be worthwhile.
Too often, we dismiss passions as frivolous — if they’re not making money or leading to some tangible achievement, they’re seen as distractions rather than essentials.
But Ford’s unapologetic love for collecting — not for status, not for income, just for the sheer joy of it — shows the beauty of doing something purely for yourself.
And it’s not just books. Ford has always made time for the things that light him up. He’s surfed, played hockey for years. Now he shows up at jiu-jitsu six days a week. He spends weekend mornings at library sales. None of these things serve his career. But all of them make his world bigger, fuller.
“Life is just so much more interesting when you have these things you’re deeply passionate about,” Ford says. “I can’t imagine not having these things in my life.”
I couldn’t agree more. Our passions give us so much — the thrill of the pursuit, the joy of learning, the relationships we build along the way. They aren’t just pastimes; they shape who we are.
And if we’re lucky, we’ll get to chase them for a lifetime.
Takeaways
One Lesson: Do It for the Love of It
Ford’s passion for book collecting has nothing to do with his career. It doesn’t make him money, build his reputation, or lead to some greater purpose. He does it simply because he loves it. In a world that constantly asks us to monetize our interests, his story is a reminder that passion doesn’t need to be productive — it just needs to matter to you.
One Exercise: Follow the Threads
Think about a time when you went down a rabbit hole — not because you had to, but because you couldn’t help yourself. Maybe it was a random internet deep dive, a book you devoured, or a topic that kept resurfacing in your life. This week, follow one of those threads. Buy a book on the subject, go explore a relevant spot, or just spend 30 minutes letting your curiosity lead.
One Curiosity: The Stories Hiding on Bookshelves
Ever since talking to Ford, I’ve started paying more attention to older books. Now, when I step into a used bookstore, I don’t just browse—I wonder. Could this edition be rare? Who owned it before? Is there a piece of history tucked between the pages? Every book has a past, and I’m starting to realize how much of that past is hidden in plain sight.
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