I collect rare books. Most often first editions, signed; but extremely rare first editions that are unsigned are welcome in my collection too.
Does anybody else indulge in this hobby?
I have both firsts and signed copies, but I tend to limit it to authors I have some connection to (more than just liking their work). I never saw any reason to have a special edition of a reading book. 
I used to and still have many. I sold off my jewels to pay for house stuff and buy old guitars ;). Used to have a bunch of high spots, like To Kill a Mockingbird, Dune and the Winnie the Pooh books. Books are great.
I don’t collect rare books, but I do own a copy of book that was hard as heck to find, The Quiet Earth (1981), but Kiwi writer Craig Harrison (later made into a movie). Mainly to see if it added anything more to how the movie ended, but it didn’t.
Fantastic movie. I poked around for a copy of the book once but never found it. Stuff from NZ is even harder to find than stuff from Australia… I’ve had to settle for one (1) collection of Footrot Flats, for example.
I do have a mint original Ace 35-cent copy of Red Alert, the (serious) novel that was made into Dr. Strangelove.
And what an expert colleague called “possibly the finest copy of The Green Hills of Earth in existence.”
My wife and I collect books. Not in the sense of being “Book Collectors”, but in the sense of buying lots of books and never getting rid of them.
But still, do that for long enough and you’re bound to acquire some interesting pieces. I do have one area of interest. I’ve long been a “space buff” and have a fondness for astronaut biographies. I’ve got about thirty of them, a bout six or seven signed, including one by a Mercury astronaut and one by a moonwalker.
And just got this little tidbit at a library sale last week for a dollar!
The lack of an ISBN is probably all that saved it from the “Scanner people”, who, IMHO, are ruining these sales.
I haven’t mentioned my 20th Century American Humor collection in a while. (Now slopping over into the 21st Century.) I have first editions of almost every major prose humor book by everyone you’ve ever heard of and many you haven’t. (That includes humorists, comedians, and comic actors, and also biographies of them.) Not too many are signed, though. I’d rather buy two or five books I need for the price of that one signed copy.
They’re not all hardcovers. Humor, much like science fiction, is thought of as a distinctly secondary genre so many important titles first appear in mass-market or trade paperback, again much like science fiction. I have signed copies of Gibson’s *Neuromancer *and Zelazny’s This Immortal, both paperback originals. They have some value but about an order of magnitude less than if they had been issued in hardcover.
I like collecting books on abstruse subjects, and they tend to have been published in small numbers. Hollow earth. Conspiracy theories. I think I’ve got one published by the Psychiatric Inpatients’ Liberation Movement. I’m also very fond of old copies of the works of John Buchan.
Today I stumbled on a couple of old books. Looked interesting, so I looked closer. Two late nineteenth century volumes of something called Yr Haul. Googled it. Welsh for “The Sun”. The books are entirely in Welsh. I don’t speak Welsh. I’d like to know what they’re about, but googling brings up lots of results which are in Welsh.
I have some old first editions (some signed) of books about Alaska. I’d actually like to sell them off, but ebay is such a PITA nowadays.
I’d love to get Buzz Aldrin’s autograph.
Cernan’s, rather than Aldrins. Found that one at a used book store for $6.
The flip side of signed books are those like Kirk Alyn’s A Job for Superman. Alyn was the Superman of the 40s serials. In 1971 he self-published an account of those halcyon days. AFAIK, he signed every copy. If you can find an unsigned copy you have a true collector’s item.
That’s a joke about many, many famous authors who do lots of signings but for Alyn and similar cases it is literally true.
Exapno @ #7:. Got Irvin S. Cobb?
Sadly Murray Ball died earlier this year. Heaps of books on TradeMe though.
The fairly new Footrot flats websiteis awesome.
I’ve got eight of his, seven of them firsts. He’s tough to collect because so much of his stuff is on the border between fiction and humor and I try to draw the line at fiction. I probably should spend some time sorting him out.
What the heck is en.m.wikipedia.org and how is it different from regular Wikipedia?
I have first-edition hardcovers of all twelve volumes of The History of Middle-Earth. Not because I’m a collector, really, but because when they came out, I wanted them.
I saw a couple of the volumes on display in a local second-hand shop for hundreds of dollars each, though I’m not actually convinced that my copies are actually worth all that. For one thing, they’re generally not first printings, though they are first editions. But still, it’s nice to think…!
Mobile version, looks better on cell phones. Delete the ‘m.’ to see the regular page.
ETA: Answering Exapno Mapcase’s question.
Thanks.
One library in my area allows them only on opening night, which is restricted to Friends of the Library only, and charges $20 for the privilege. They started doing this after having to call the police several times in one sale for fistfights. :eek:
I have a sizable collection of old medical books and enjoy reading them. Amazing what used to be state of the art medicine, and our books will be just as interesting to medical historians, amateur and otherwise, a century from now. Even 20 years from now, for that matter.
Back in the late 80’s I lived in East Lansing, Michigan, and there was a used bookshop called Curious Books.
I picked up and flipped through a home health care book from the very early 1900’s. It was authored by a female physician, more rare for those days. It was suprisingly frank and sensible, especially when it came to “female” issues, like periods and puberty. I didn’t buy it, as I had not need, but it rather impressed me.
Much better than an antique book I saw in the house of a friend. It was part of a series and was called “What Every Young Man Should Know” It was the kind of book the spoke of “self abuse”, and the author assured readers he knew young men who’d gone insane from the practise.