"The Rev. Cofield knows exactly when and why his addiction developed. When he was a young African-American child growing up in rural North Carolina, he said, “The racial tension and segregation meant that you were not allowed to be in a lot of areas. And so, in order to spend your time well, my mother and father put into my head, ‘You can go anywhere through books.’ So books became the way I overrode all those things to know the world. And that’s why books became so important to me. I’ve been collecting books since I was four years old. It was kind of like a fetish with me,” he admitted. “Out of my ten-cent allowance, I bought some five cent classics” by authors like Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe and others."

Read this article.