First Edition Books: Got Any Good Ones?

Cafe Society
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My book collecting career has been pretty exasperating. I used to have a first edition of that, but had to sell it a long time ago when I got into financial problems.

I also remember a time when I saw a stack of books by a then fairly well known but not as “hot” author as he is nowadays at the Brown University Bookstore. There were ten or twelve of them, all first editions, they weren’t going too fast and at only $20 a pop I could probably have been rich today had I bought all of them and asked for more.

It was “The Dark Tower” by Stephen King.

:smack:

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I have several firsts and ARCs, mostly SF & Fantasy. I think my favorites are the 3 books in George R. R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice. 1st edition hardbacks and ARCs, for all three books, all signed by George. Then there is the 1st draft of a short story by Anne McCaffery, signed by Anne. 1st English and Spanish editions of Tuf Voyaging, signed by George. A couple of Japanese editions of Wild Cards books. Several by Joe Haldeman, including Forever Peace, all signed.

Better stop before I get into the Turtledoves, Stirlings, and Feists. :stuck_out_tongue:

Exapno Mapcase, I just want to say, I am extremely jealous of that collection.

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panache45 - wow; interesting. How did you know Ayn Rand. That collection is worth a ton.

Exapno - I knew you had some great stuff, but that’s wonderful. I have a first of I, Robot, but not in nearly as nice condition and not inscribed. I just sold my firsts of The Foundation Trilogy.

ArchiveGuy - that Pooh book could be worth a ton. I just sold my full set of 1st UK Pooh’s and they go for a pretty penny. There are some specific things you need to look for - is it a true first, does it have the dust jacket, are the endpapers blank - things like that. But if it checks out, it is worth insuring.

JoeSki - I have a 1st of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. I’ve debated selling it, but really enjoy the book, so have held off so far…

Ol’Gaffer - If you really have a first of Charlie, that is a big deal. As with the Pooh book, there is a lot to check out - is it truly a first, is it a first state (you need to see if the little statement - called the colophon - on the last page of the book has 6 lines or 5. If 6 it is a first edition/first state and worth a LOT more). Worth checking out…

As you can tell, I have been REALLY into first edition collecting. Lately I have been selling a few off - I had to slow down collecting with a job change, and when I started my mid-life crisis rock n’ roll band, I have been devoting more energy and money to that and selling books to fund a new guitar and amp, etc… - my wife likes my hobbies to be “cashflow neutral” y’know?

Anyway - with all that, I still have some gems:

Lit - firsts of Catch-22, Catcher in the Rye, A Farewell to Arms, Native Son, Cannery Row, Babbitt, an inscribed copy of Potok’s The Chosen and others, with my favorite being To Kill a Mockingbird. I just sold a review copy of A Confederacy of Dunces and also As I Lay Dying…sigh

Sci-Fi - a signed copy of Snow Crash, Ender’s Game, Brave New World and my favorite, Dune - very tough to identify a true first of Dune…took a lot of research.

Detective - Hound of the Baskervilles, Name of the Rose, a run of signed Elmore Leonards (several signed to me).

Children’s - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1st edition, 2nd state, darn it!), a run of the UK Gift editions of Harry Potter and One Fish Two Fish by Dr. Seuss…

Plays - really only one: The Philadelphia Story, the play version of the movie starring Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. Beautiful photo of Kate on the dust jacket. Rarely seen and when you find it, it goes for over $1,000. I found it for $30 over the internet when I was testing out a new rare book search engine…

Non-Fiction - The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a Review Copy sent to FDR’s son, the Congressman, two months before release. Also the first US edition of Einstein’s Relativity from 1920. Oh, and Aerosmith’s biography - Walk this Way - signed by the band.

I have a bunch of others, but you get the idea. Hey, some people collect wine, I collect books I love…

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The Sun Also Rises , by Ernest Hemingway
For Whom The Bell Tolls , same
A Farewell To Arms , same
In Cold Blood , Truman Capote
Lady Chatterly’s Lover , D. H. Lawrence (a Valentine’s Day present to my wife)

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Cool! Is your “Sun” with a dust jacket? Is it the first state, with the “stoppped” misprint and “In Our Times” on the dust jacket? That is true collector’s high spot!!

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One, and only one: Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett, which is now out of print I think.

It was an accident, really.

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Oh, wow. I forgot the Discworld Firsts. I have every one since Feet of Clay. British Editions, all signed.

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Thanks, WordMan and Lok. I started collecting Gnome Press books on a lark back in 1980 when I found five of them for $5 each in a used book store. I hadn’t been collecting anything seriously and I thought that this would be a reasonable goal to achieve.

Bought a couple of books a year every year for twenty-five years. Waited three years for a fine edition of Conan the Barbarian to fall into my hands for less than the $400 everybody wanted for it to complete the set. Being patient like that really pays off. The Asimov books alone are worth far more than I paid for all 86 books combined.

I still have a couple of associational items to find, like the 1951 calendar, to round up everything that Gnome ever did but that can wait yet more years.

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Richard Bachman’s “Thinner.” HCDJ.

The original (edited) Stand. HCDJ.

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I don’t have many left for my own collection, but I was a (admittedly small time) dealer for several years until real life intervened. I have all of Iain Pears British firsts signed and fine in dustjackets. I have most all of Sir Richard Francis Burton’s biographies in first edition.

Much more fun is what has passed through my hands on its way to others. I have sold:

Fellowship of the Ring - American first, first printing in dj. Bought for $5 at a nice rare book store of all places, they weren’t too quick on the uptake.

Nearly all of Twain’s firsts except for Jumping Frog.

All but two of Sir Richard Francis Burton’s first editions. He was my bread and butter. His works rose in price steadily each year, and could be had much more cheaply at auction in Britain than you coudl in the US. Someday though I will reassemble that collection.

A nice first of Zora Neale Hurston’s, **Their Eyes Were Watching God ** in dj.

Two copies of A River Runs Through It, one crappy ex-library copy, and one nearly perfect one.

Marquis De Sade’s Justine printed in Amsterdam with some wild erotic woodcuts.

Most of what I sold was eighteenth and nineteenth century travel and exploration. There were some truly beatiful works in there, I was always sorry to let anything go.

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Wow. I found mine in a small hole-in-the-wall bookstore on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. I really lucked out because I didn’t have enough pounds and they didn’t take credit cards, so I had to put it on hold while I ran to the bank (I was leaving the next morning). When I got back, there was this pushy American lady badgering the bookstore proprietor because she wanted something “special” for her kid and wanted to be shown what they had. I had just pulled this copy off the shelf, so when the rude lady was demanding to see the book on hold behind the counter, the nice bookstore lady refused, saying it was on reserve. Overall, I probably paid around $60 for it.

It’s was my wife’s Christmas present that year. :slight_smile:

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I have a copy of George R R Martin’s A Game of Thrones which is (I think) from the rather small initial US run. I did purchase it quite shortly after it was initially published, after (fortunately) having it recommended to me by some coworkers.
Cooler than that, however… my maternal grandfather was an eminent logician and mathematician, and I inherited from him a first edition of Godel, Escher, Bach, and a numbered and monogrammed hardcover edition of the Handbook of Mathematical Functions. But even cooler than THAT… he was a fan of science fiction, and he and my (still living) grandmother have willed to me his run of Amazing Stories (or whatever magazine later became Analog) dating back to the 1930’s (I think), and thus including the entire Golden Age of Science Fiction.

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I’m damned envious now.