[image description: a US dollar bill on a wooden desk with a small plant.]

As though I didn’t have a ton of unread books on my shelves already, most of my quarantine purchases have been books.

Part of it is because I want the bookstores I love to stay in business. Another part of it is that I want to stay sane, and losing myself in a book is a good way to do both. However, this has got me thinking about book budgets.

With the economy being what it is with coronavirus, a lot of people are thinking about money more than usual, myself included. (This is especially true for me because I recently cut down to 4 days a week at my day job so I could have more time to work on writing and my vintage shop.) I want to be cautious about spending, but since I am still employed I don’t want to be so cautious that I fail to support the businesses I want to see around when all this is over. (I realize this is a choice that not everyone has the privilege of making right now.)

All of which has got me thinking about book budgets. Growing up, I was only allowed to have one bookshelf in my room, so when it got full, that was it; no more books. So I’d hide books under my bed and in the closet. I always said when I got older I’d let myself have as many books as I wanted, but I failed to consider that buying books requires money and when you’re fresh out of college in an entry-level job, you don’t have a lot of extra money. I still bought books, but I almost exclusively shopped at used bookstores and library sales.

In recent years I’ve gotten better jobs with commensurate pay, so I allowed myself to buy a new book here and there. But it’s hard not to get carried away. These days I’m buying almost exclusively new books and I tend not to set limits for myself, reasoning that there are worse addictions out there. I mean, I don’t know what the going rate is for cocaine these days, but it’s got to be more expensive than my monthly stacks of books, right?

All that to say, I’ve never given myself a strict book budget before and I’m wondering how y’all do it, if y’all do it.

The way I see it, there are a couple of options:

• a dollar limit for book purchases

• a limit on the number of book purchases

• an overall entertainment/art budget, of which books are a part

• a rule about the ratio of new books vs used books purchased

• a dollar limit for book purchases, but with exceptions (perhaps excluding the purchase of books from friends who are authors or library book sales since those are for a good cause)

• some other creative calculation

I think money should be an openly discussed issue because keeping quiet about it is how we as a society stay so confused about it and how companies exploit workers (there’s a reason they don’t want you to discuss your pay with your coworkers!).

So I want to know: Do you have a book budget? If so, how is it structured?