Aside from literature, which I love, I have found that I have quite a fondness for owning textbooks, both physical and digital. (Reading them is a whole different story, though)
I have a textbook for Non-Classical Logic, Rock-Forming-Minerals, both of which I don’t even begin to comprehend as I lack the fundamentals, General Physics, General Maths, Zoology, Lichen, Insect Morphology (didn’t even know about that one anymore), Invertebrates excluding insects, Freshwater Biology, a bunch of species identification keys, Inductive Statistics, etc. etc.
Some of those I obviously need for university, but most are stuff I just found for free somewhere and took or downloaded with the intention of learning something.
I always have this scenario in mind of society collapsing, but it won’t be a problem for me because I have a lot of things to learn. Does anyone here have a similar “condition”? Haha
Not really hoarding, but…
There are some textbooks and classes out there that people in the profession define as incredibly elegant/able to provide the reader with intuitive understanding of the material, and making the hard feel easy.
Feynmann is usually talked about this way in physics, the youtuber 3blue1brown specialises in doing that for math, and so on.
Whenever I find out about those people I always get the book/course even if it’s totally out of my field, because I love the process of learning and great teachers are so hard to come by: Mayzelis’ Soviet Chess Primer, Nicolaides’ The Natural Way To Draw, Silvanus’ Calculus Made Easy, and so on.