A nearly complete 1900-ish set of Dickens with Victorian illustrations. $35. Since the set was missing A Tale of Two Cities, the store owner let me have a more modern edition of Vanity Fair for free.
A boxed 1943 edition of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights with Fritz Eichenberg engravings. $17. The box is falling to pieces, but the books are in great condition.
Not a book, but I found an illuminated page from a 13th-century psalter in a used book store/antique shop in Oxford, and paid 5 pounds for it.
My best find in a used bookstore to date was a plastic-bagged copy of the Dallas Morning-News,evening edition, on the day Kennedy was shot for $.50. Gave it to my mother as a Christmas gift two years ago.
The best odd find I’ve ever had was stuffed in a jumbled pile in a section of the store that it looked like no one ever went into. It appeared to be the pile of hard-backed books that they thought they could never move. Stuck in the middle of it was an old English textbook by one J.R.R. Tolkien. Not good for reading but it’s a nifty collectable.
I can’t find it right now or I’d give you the actual title. It appears to be an English textbook for about highschool or early college level work. Grammar lessons, things like that but not a children’s level thing. Written in the mid-40’s as I recall (post-Hobbit, pre-Rings).
I found the Little House books by Laura Engles Wilder. The Entire set was about 4 bucks. At the same store I bought about 8 Footrot Flats cartoon books.
And once at a library book sale I got a book by Thomas Payne dated from the 18th century. It was a nickel.
When I moved to New Jersey I bought a book listing New York bookstores. One, which was mostly a movie store, was said to have old sf magazines. When I visited it turned out they didn’t even remember they had them. When the clerk brought them out, they hadn’t been repriced for about a decade, so I got a very good deal on early '50s F&SFs.
And speaking of them, I bought the special Bradbury issue of F&SF at A Change of Hobbit in Berkeley, which turned out to be autographed, unknown to them.
I also got some 1900 vintage editions of Mr. Dooley books at the Brattle Bookshop in Boston for about $2 a piece. That may be what they’re worth, but I was happy.
This is a timely thread. Just this weekend my SO and I were browsing through our favorite antique store and we found a 10 volume set of privately published erotica (dated 1931 and signed by “B. Floyd Flickerton”). It contains “Casanova’s Memoirs,” a “Daphnis and Chloe” complete with etchings, a volume of Indian Love Poems (this stuff is very erotic, no wonder there are a billion people living in India), some Grecian works, and a few other titles that escape me. All handsomely bound in red leather. The whole set cost us $10. We’ve decided that vintage and antique erotica may be a fun thing to collect (thanks, but I’ll pass on the first issue of Playboy to show public hair - I already have it).
**Sinbad and Me ** by Kin Platt that is out of print and impossible to find. Ebay prices it out around $90 and up. A used book store in Carlisle, PA (where hubby’s best friend lives) had a copy and mailed it to me for a whopping cost of $3.00 (including s&h)
**Godfather ** Mario Puzo. My original garage sale copy cost twenty five cents, but I loaned it out on a permanent basis to someone and I wanted to read it again and did not want to buy it new. So a few years of looking, and never going over my twenty five cent price tag (and never seeing it either) I found it at a garage sale for ten cents. I was estatic.
And I have picked up through garage sales, the entire Disney book collection brand new for roughly seventy five cents a book.
Ohhh. and another children’s book collection: Brambley Hedge (Jill Barklem) which are about $8 a book, I picked up four of her books at a resale shop for $8 in new condition. I was over the moon about that for quite some time.
I just scored at a Library Sale for fifty cents: Mists of Avalon and something else that was Pretty Cool but I can’t recall at this time.
I always have a book list on me for books to keep an eye out for, I offer my services to help locate an old book for someone if they have been looking for some time.
Twenty-some years ago, I was in a vaudeville troupe in upstate New York (no, really, I was!). In one tiny town, our office and costume shop was the upstairs of the town library—the shelves were lined with books taken out of circulation. Thousands of novels, textbooks and nonfiction things from the mid-19th century up through the 1930s! We were we all fascinated.
So I went to the librarian and asked, “ummmm, do you think you’d consider selling us any of those old books?” She thought for awhile, and said, “well, I’d have to charge you twenty-five cents apiece for them . . .” Yow! We filled up shopping bags! I still have about a dozen of those treasures at home.
First printing, Heinlein, Menace from Earth. Worth about five bucks, but, well, tis a treasure.
About half the Lensman saga, back when Doc Smith’s estate was refusing to let them be reprinted thanks to the abuse of them by the anime-without-permission.
I’ve always been a big fan of photography. During one of my internships, I did a lot of searching through stock photo books and discovered my favorite photographer, Howard Schatz. The problem is, at the time, the two books of his I really wanted (Pool Light and Waterdance) were both out of print and incredibly expensive. Then, in the same week, traveling the various Half Priced Book Stores in the area, I managed to find both books in pretty good condition for about $20 a piece. They’re truly stunning works and grace my mantlepiece. I’m very proud of those.
On a fairly less fancy note, I’m a big Terry Pratchett fan, and it’s rather hard to find his books. I’d been looking for Sourcery for a good long while, and one day, I found a book called Rincewind the Wizzard. I picked it up thinking it was something new, and also because the artwork was rather impressive on the cover. As I was standing in line, I realized it was a collection of the first four books involving this character, and I felt rather happy with that chance find.
My most valuable is a first edition of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand at a Friends of the County Library booksale for $1.
I bought a signed first edition of Children of Dune by Frank Herbert at a used book store for $25. I’m not a huge Herbert fan but it is one of only 1500 and it came in a cool case.
I also got (from the same bookstore as the Herbert) an interesting Tolkien work. It is a collection of scholarly articles by various authors (kind of like a festschrift) in celebration of Tolkien’s 70th birthday and published by Oxford Press. The book is at home but I can post the full title if anyone is interested.
Mrs. Angel was in London on business a few years ago and went used book shopping on one of her days off.
She brought me home a first edition hardcover of “My Name is Asher Lev”, one of my favorite novels. She paid a whopping 5 pounds for it, in excellent condition.
My own personal best was in the Book Worm in Prescott AZ. I found an Armed Forces first edition of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, also in excellent condition. It was $25, but I still felt it a great find even though the cost reflected actual market price.
As a collector of first editions, I have a bunch of great stories, but I will keep it to a bare minimum:
I was given a first edition of Angela’s Ashes by a friend who knew it was collectible and that I was a collector, but they didn’t want it anymore (even after I told them it was worth over $200)
I found a signed first UK edition of Douglas Adams’ “So Long and Thanks for all the Fish” for $2
I found a first edition of the play “The Philadelphia Story” by Philip Barry published with a beautiful photo of Katherine Hepburn on the cover, for $35
I found a copy of the first U.S. edition of Einstein’s “Relativity” from 1920, for $200. In dust jacket. Oh yeah.
I bought a signed copy of Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” - published simultaneously in soft and hard cover, so there were well under 1000 hard covers, for $250
I found a copy of Grisham’s “A Time to Kill” - pretty sure it was a first book club. Not interested in Grisham myself, so lugged it along to a used bookstore, just in case I needed it for trade. Sure enough, I was able to trade it for first editions, first states of Asimov’s Foundation and Foundation and Empire. I paid $5 for the Grisham. Score.
The list goes on. I love my collection. And I love the hunt.
