Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Collecting Books By Authors You Love


David Baddiel, for the Times Online highlights why you should only collect books from the authors you love.

From the story...

While I was briefly in the market, Rick Gekoski, the former Booker judge and bookseller, showed me a copy of a first edition of Lolita that Nabakov had given as a present to Graham Greene and in which, on the inner flap, Nabakov had written a short message adorned with a butterfly. Looking at it made the goosepimples rise on my flesh. I'm not sure anything else but a book could contain such a microcosmically expressive thing: and somehow, for that to work, it matters that the book is a first edition.

The lesson I've learnt, I think, is that if you do fancy collecting books, best to forget about speculating, and just to think of a first edition as a kind of totem. Just get the ones, in other words, by the writers you actually love, and keep them.


Indeed. Just starting out collecting, after I received as a gift a first edition Jack London book, I went nuts, scouring used book stores and Ebay for ANY first edition bargain. I got a lot of Anne Tyler books, for example, on the cheap. This isn't to say that Anne Tyler isn't a good writer, oh no, it's just that I will probably never ever read an Anne Tyler novel and yet, there on my shelf, quite a few Anne Tyler first editions.

And, really, EVERY title had a first edition at some point. There's no way one can collect first editions without slimming down and specifically targeting your book collecting search. Yes, I CAN afford that first edition of Dean Koontz' Beastchild, but, uh, why do I want it? I don't read Koontz and even if I kept it in hopes that it'd go up in price, who would buy a first edition of Beastchild anyway? A Koontz collector, I imagine. But where does one FIND one of those people?

That said, give me Jack London and John Steinbeck and throw in a few Hemingway's to boot. That'll keep me occupied for some time to come.

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