Well I'm shocked for one.

[oggbashan]

I like old books.

Being a bookseller, when I say old, I mean old. Anything printed after 1800 doesn't count.

I love to handle and read a book that is over two hundred years old, to look at the owners' names in the front, the annotations to the text and even where the book falls open at a favourite place.

The oldest book I've had in the shop was a Bible printed in 1574. It was Tyndale's version, remarkably similar to the King James (authorised) version, but startlingly different in some places. I should have kept it but a customer offered cash money.

I still regret selling it but that's business.

I have some French newpapers from the 1790s - the real thing not modern copies. Reading what was happening at the time is amazing. Debates, foreign news, executions, denounciations I expected. What I didn't expect was book and play reviews and correspondence on the philosophy of education.

Those papers were brought to England. I wonder how? They were used to provide foreign news for an English newspaper. They were sold in the 1970s after being transferred to micro-fiche. Holding a real newspaper that old is much better than looking at a screen.

Downside - when I visit France my language is up-to-date for the 1790s.

Og

 

[SlickTony]

The oldest book I've had in the shop was a Bible printed in 1574. It was Tyndale's version, remarkably similar to the King James (authorised) version, but startlingly different in some places. I should have kept it but a customer offered cash money.

Yowza! How much did he pay for it? I'm surprised you didn't have it under lock and key somewhere.

I don't read nearly as many books as I used to, although I do have a small bookcase in the loo. If the survey didn't count places like this and other internet forums, no wonder they got such discouraging results.

 

[Belegon]

Being a bookseller, when I say old, I mean old. Anything printed after 1800 doesn't count.

I love to handle and read a book that is over two hundred years old, to look at the owners' names in the front, the annotations to the text and even where the book falls open at a favourite place.

The oldest book I've had in the shop was a Bible printed in 1574. It was Tyndale's version, remarkably similar to the King James (authorised) version, but startlingly different in some places. I should have kept it but a customer offered cash money.
Og

oldest thing I own is an 1896 copy of "Hamlet". Bought it for 50 cents in a used book store back in about 1987.

I'd love to have a little collection someday.

 

[Clare Quilty]

I blame the public school system. I was shocked to learn that many public schools don't require kids to read entire novels in literature classes. They read abridged Readers-Digest-like versions in their textbooks. I can't overstate how aghast I was by this revelation. When I took high school English, we had to read several novels per semester. It never occured to me that things would have changed so much in so short of a time.

This, it seems to me, is just another instance of the increasing schism between the haves and everyone else. You can bet your sweet bippy that kids attending New York's Dalton School are reading the classics as well as contemporary novels of note.

As for me and mine, I've already forced the kid to read "The Pride and the Prejudice", "The Catcher in the Rye" and "The Great Gatsby", thus far this summer. The kid loved Catcher and Gastby but was contemptuous of the Victorian attitudes exhibited by the Bennet's in PATP. Next on the Paternal coercion bookclub list, "The Grapes of Wrath."

 

[Belegon]

As for me and mine, I've already forced the kid to read "The Pride and the Prejudice", "The Catcher in the Rye" and "The Great Gatsby", thus far this summer. The kid loved Catcher and Gastby but was contemptuous of the Victorian attitudes exhibited by the Bennet's in PATP. Next on the Paternal coercion bookclub list, "The Grapes of Wrath."

This is a "policy" I will possibly steal from you in some manner. I am already using the "tricks" my dad used on me, things like buying Hank Aarons kid-friendly biography for me when it was just a little old for me but I was already in love with baseball, things of that nature.

 

[oggbashan]

Yowza! How much did he pay for it? I'm surprised you didn't have it under lock and key somewhere.

Forty pounds. It was very battered, with no covers and had lost the first thirty chapters of Genesis. The date was still on the title page for the New Testament.

Og

 

[SlickTony]

It was very battered, with no covers and had lost the first thirty chapters of Genesis.

Still, considering how old it was, that's not a bad condition for a hardback book. I've had books that started to fall apart on me when I'd had them for less than five. They do not bind books like they used to.

 

[Clare Quilty]

This is a "policy" I will possibly steal from you in some manner. I am already using the "tricks" my dad used on me, things like buying Hank Aarons kid-friendly biography for me when it was just a little old for me but I was already in love with baseball, things of that nature.

I too use a trick of my father's. It's called because I said so.