Which is your preferred edition of book?

Cafe Society
21

I also collect first editions - we should talk some time fruitbat - I haven’t been as active lately, but I have some really great ones from back in the day before mortgage and kids - I have a gorgeous 1st/all desired points of Huck Finn in the standard green binding - the picture of the bust of Twain does not show the tablecloth, but that is a variant, not an issue point…okay, enough collecting geekiness.

Back to the OP - I tend to get trade paperbacks and read them. If I love the book, I try to acquire a first edition - a true first from their home country, preferably signed.

I love libraries in concept and support my local one to the hilt, but prefer owning my own books…

22

Ooooohhh! I once had, but sold, a first of Is Shakespeare Dead with a nearly perfect restored dustjacket. I miss it the same way I would miss a child given up for adoption. I am such a geek.

23

I once had a 12th edition Ulysses, Shakespeare and Company, pages uncut. And a 1st, signed, of Ellman’s James Joyce. I had all of Paul Auster’s and Russell Hoban’s novels, firsts, signed. Had three shelves of Joyceana, about two thirds of it firsts.

Re: libraries. The above nostalgia was when I had a book fetish. I managed, with some withdrawal symptoms, to lick that horrid addiction (I sympathize with you, Lissa, though you stole the first four letters of my name, making it necessary for me to type in my whole name for a vanity search) and am now a library geek.

When I was hoarding books, each book literally had fetishistic value. Like Lissa, once I’d read a book, the book represented a kind of material embodiment of the experience of reading it: each book is a souvenir of the journey I’d made through it. As such, I needed to keep it, to cherish it, as an object. You miss that physical aspect of a book when you take it out from the library.

Or so I thought. I was wrong. Libary books are still somehow materially important to the reading experience, but now that physical connection is a different one: it’s a connection of community. When I was a bookrat, each book was mine and mine alone, and was the mystical repository of my experience of reading it. When I started reading library books, I found it was just as rewarding and pleasurable to hold and experience each book as the mysticl repository of that special group of readers with whom I now had this book in common. When I occasionally reread a Lagerkvist or a Laxness or an Undset, books in which I have lived as deeply, if not more so, as I live in the “real world,” it’s comforting–almost thrilling–to sense that I am not alone in that experience. That this book I am holding, in which I am living while I read it, has offered the same kind of refuge or adventure or solace to a few other fellow human beings.

Each book, now, feels like a friend, rather than a possession. I couldn’t imagine ever going back to the narrowly gratifying but ultimately lonely fetish of being the sole owner of each book I read.

24

lissener - I hear you, and would argue that you are describing two great feelings that are both worthy yet quite different.

Going to a library and seeing that they have a bunch of well-worn and loved copies of books like Ender’s Game or the Foundation Trilogy or Confederacy of Dunces or Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series - you get the idea - is cool. It is wonderful to see books that I care about - especially those that have not crossed over to become well-known classics to the mainstream public - are clearly widely read and loved. I really dig that.

Your quote:

Really rings true for me, which is why I go out of my way to acquire hardcover firsts of books that affected me. I know exactly where I was when I read Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and to have a first of his short story collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories gives me a huge charge of memories and pleasure when I pull it off the shelf. Same with Dune - that was my all-time favorite sci-fi book when I read it several times as a teen; getting a true first (not easy to do - there are many variants and bibliographers still debate what points a true first must have) was a huge, huge deal for me. Pulling that off the shelf and grooving over the story in my mind, or reading a passage from the book is a joyous thing. Not something one can do as easily with books from a library. Not better, just different.

25

The library is a great concept, and a great institution in practice, but my tastes aren’t like a lot of people’s, and I like new books, paperbacks, not hardcovers, which is what the library has, mostly. And then there is a limit to how long you can have the books out, like Blockbuster, and honestly, I want to buy books for myself - for MY library. Okay, so it’s a library with one member, but all I have to do is log on to Amazon or here or any number of places to find that there are plenty of others who have read the same book.

26

Another book fetishist.

We collect first of things we like as opposed to buying only for investment though we would like to run/own a used book store someday.

We buy in hardback mostly. I’ll buy mass or usually trade if available if it’s a book or writer I don’t know but caught my interest. If I like it enough I’ll find it in first.

Hubby is a fan of the library, I don’t have as much luck. 7 out of 10 times he’ll wind up wanting the book for our collection, half the time he’ll get it.

Someone mentioned a thrift store that doesn’t know what it has and has not been found buy the local used book seller? Where you at?

And eBay…wouldn’t have my Jonathan Carroll collection without them. Or Hubby’s John Lansdale’s.