Do you own (any) first edition hardbacks?

[Desiremakesmeweak]

I've met a few (well, at least two) actual, you know 'COLLECTORS,' and I find them totally unlike people who actually like books or reading.

There may well be those who really do care about books and writers and stories or histories and narrative content and journals - but I haven't met them yet.

I'd personally love to have a Chandler, of course.

It's just a great art form, real books... With a real function, not just to look at or stick in some UV free vault.

 

[oggbashan]

I've met a few (well, at least two) actual, you know 'COLLECTORS,' and I find them totally unlike people who actually like books or reading.

There may well be those who really do care about books and writers and stories or histories and narrative content and journals - but I haven't met them yet.

I'd personally love to have a Chandler, of course.

It's just a great art form, real books... With a real function, not just to look at or stick in some UV free vault.

There are technical terms to distinguish bookowners, but they vary by country.

Those who collect first editions because they are first editions have to have them in perfect condition as objets d'art - to be looked at but never handled.

Those who collect first editions by their favourite author are very different. Their joy is in handling that book and loving it for its content. They can and sometimes do have a copy for reading, and a first edition to cherish, but their real love is the story.

There are bibliophiles who love having their own library of books but there are subsets - those who have a working library to read and study; and those who just like looking at the untouched books with a pride of ownership.

There are bibliomaniacs who collect any and all books and can't resist buying more. I helped clear the house of one local bibliomaniac. He used to go to jumble sales and boot fairs and buy the left-over books by the boxful. His small house was dangerously overloaded with books in every room. He had thousands of Readers' Digest Condensed Books - an infalliable sign of a bibliomaniac. Those books are cheap secondhand and even charity shops throw them out as unsaleable.

I like looking at libraries in English stately homes.

Some are statements of wealth with uniform leather bindings with the owner's coat of arms. Some of those are arranged by size of book, not subject. They are wall decoration, not for reading.

Some are/were for use and divided into sensible categories. I could imagine the owner picking up a book, settling into his favourite armchair, and enjoying himself. Aside - that's the sign of a stately home owner who read from his library - comfortable furniture.

A very few were working libraries. There are two libraries at Sissinghurst (National Trust). One was Vita Sackville-West's work room; the other was their joint reference library and relaxation room. It was the most important room in the house. The furniture is for comfortable sprawling with a desk or two for heavier books or for writing. Both libraries are kept as if the owners have just left them for a few minutes.

 

[elfin_odalisque]

I've met a few (well, at least two) actual, you know 'COLLECTORS,' and I find them totally unlike people who actually like books or reading.

There may well be those who really do care about books and writers and stories or histories and narrative content and journals - but I haven't met them yet.

I'd personally love to have a Chandler, of course.

It's just a great art form, real books... With a real function, not just to look at or stick in some UV free vault.

Yes, I inherited some first editions of Churchill's war memoirs etcetera. However, I think my treasured first editions are the copies of "Spank" that he hid in his bedroom cupboard.

What you learn about parents. Still, they have quite a value nowadays. (Not the parents!)

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

A most thorough exposition, I must say, Ogg. And well worth reading for those interested in such matters - which I am.

...Can't see myself ever owning a first edition of 'Spank' merely as a collector's item, never to touch or look at!

 

[ishtat]

It's very, very old, not a book and definitely not a first edition despite its age. It is a fragment of a clay tablet presented to a great uncle who was involved in an archaeological dig in Iraq in the 1920's.

The author is En-hed-u-ana, who was high priestess of the goddess Innana at Ur in about 2250 BC - almost 4300 years ago. She wrote a lot of poems and hymns to her goddess. These were inscribed on wet clay tablets that were then dried in the sun.

My fragment dates from about 1500 BC and has almost no value. Why? Because her work was well known, it was used as a training exercise for apprentice scribes for hundreds of years. There are many hundreds if not thousands of copies of her work, some quite complete. There are tens of thousands of other clay tablets excavated but not yet translated and published.

A footnote. En-hed-u-ana is the first author we know by name. She lived almost 1800 years before either Homer or Sappho. However, she might have have felt at home on the AH. In some of her later writing she bitched and complained bitterly about the way she was treated!

 

[Tio_Narratore]

I have quite a few first editions, and even some bound galley proofs, of 19th and early 20th century non-fiction in my field. My favourites, though, are in poetry: a 1905 private printing of Stephen Crane's collection, Black Riders and Other Lines and a copy of the original 1965 printing of Lenore Kandel's The Love Book, saved by Linda Kerouac from the police raid for it at City Lights Bookstore. The confiscated copies were later burned.

 

[jomar]

B. F. Skinner, if that counts.

 

[oggbashan]

A most thorough exposition, I must say, Ogg. And well worth reading for those interested in such matters - which I am.

...Can't see myself ever owning a first edition of 'Spank' merely as a collector's item, never to touch or look at!

I have just edited and slightly revised some book value advice I wrote a few years ago for local charity shops.

It is based on the UK book trade, which is my area of expertise, but some of it would be useful in the US too.

I have submitted it as a 'How To'.