Book Hauls!

[Vertigo]

@Vince W how massive is massive?

I have, I think, the entire collection, though not all in the bigger format and all in English. Love them to death and regularly re-read them.

 

[hardsciencefanagain]

WHOA,there are Asterix fans here?

 

[Vince W]

These images are from a Spanish fan, but this gives you an idea of the differences:

 

[Vertigo]

Ah yes look to be bigger than mine. I have ones that look like your smaller ones and some the same size but paperback and then really small ones that are around 25cm tall of which some are colour and one or two black and white. Problem with those smallest ones is that even with my reading glasses I struggle to read them now with my poor ages eyes Must replace them with bigger ones.

I love the way the spines of those bigger ones are building up a picture. Except you're just going to have to get the full set now...

I am a serious Asterix fan. Just about the only comic books I read... again and again.

Incidentally there are a couple of other Asterix fans on the Chrons including The Judge.

 

[Extollager]

Comic art? What about the work of Carl Barks, the Duck Man?

 

[Vertigo]

WHOA,there are Asterix fans here?

Sorry missed your post @hardsciencefanagain! And yes there are (see above) of course there are... how could there not be?

Comic art? What about the work of Carl Barks, the Duck Man?

@Extollager sorry for some reason the Asterix ones are the only ones I read now. I liked Tintin when I was a kid. But Asterix is the only one I still love to read now I'm nearly 60.

 

[Vince W]

Here is a photo of what La Grande Collection looks like when complete:

As good a reason to get the full set as any @Vertigo.

 

[Vertigo]

Ah heck that's just too cool - I think I need to find some money...

Edit: ah not so cool - I don't think they do an English version

 

[hardsciencefanagain]

Any blake And Mortimer fans ?
Gaston Gaffe?

 

[dask]

Did some book hunting Labor Day:

75¢ each at one of my favorite thrift stores.

Also got A Critical Study Of Beethoven's Nine Symphonies by Hector Berlioz, an old hard back published in Great Britain, no date anywhere I can see but it looks old, late 19th or early 20 Century I'm guessing, and The Life And Works Of Beethoven by John N. Burk, Modern Library hard back, 1943. No thrift store bargain here. $6 for the former, $4 for the latter.

 

[K. Riehl]

Picked up this beauty. I have seen poor copies offered for years and I was very happy to grab one in such good condition.

 

[Extollager]

Today's mail delivery was generous. Received Folktales of Germany, a volume in the University of Chicago Folktales of the World series:

Folktales: Grimm, Asbjørnsen and Moe, Jacobs, Afanasyev, & more

Also, a nice old Norton Critical edition of Henry James's The Ambassadors;

and a box of odds and ends, some to give away.

 

[steelyglint]

Not my haul, but a most generous donation to my Book Relief UK charity bookshop. I'm still working my way through it - there were around 30 boxes of it - but what I've seen so far is quite amazing.

One item is a translation of Prometheus Bound by Gilbert Murray, published 1931 and in a dust wrapper that looks like it was new yesterday, inscribed to John and Constance Masefield. There are most of the volumes of Anne Rice's vampire series, including the first 'Interview', along with several of her Rampling and Roquelaure erotic novels, some of them signed. 10 or 12 W.H. Auden titles, a stack of Edmund Blunden items, a half-dozen Evelyn Waugh, a few Huxley, about 60 hardcovers on Jazz, a couple of hundred on poetry, not including the Auden, Eliot and Blunden mentioned, philosophy, art, biography and at least a couple of hundred modern crime fiction. Oh, and 8 or 9 non-Fleming Bond novels.

All of it is hardcover, the vast majority is first edition in dust wrapper. Most of the wrappers have protectors.

The star item, in my opinion, is what could be described as 'a book that looks like nothing'. A best-selling thriller writer known as Jack Higgins published his earliest work as Henry or Harry Patterson. 'Henry' was only used on two titles that I'm aware of. They were 'Phoenix in the Blood' 1964 Barrie & Rockliff and 'Pay the Devil' 1963 Barrie & Rockliff. This donation included copies of both. There are copies of 'Phoenix' available for £200 to £220 - it is quite a scarce first. The other is a true rarity. There are no copies of 'Pay the Devil' to be found for sale anywhere in the world at the present time - save the copy we've got. Only problem is, we've been unable to find any record of a previous sale anywhere, so we have no idea what price to put on it. I feel an eBay experiment coming on.

A few of the other items, all close to Fine in excellent wrappers...

The Raymond Chandler Omnibus (1953 Hamilton)
Herzog by Saul Bellow (1964 Viking US)
History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell (1946 Allen Unwin - Dw printed on verso of military map)
Fatherland by Robert Harris (1992 Hutchinson uncorrected proof)
ditto ditto (1992 Random House US)
A Masque of Reason by Robert Frost (1948 Cape)
Bhowani Junction by John Masters (1954 Michael Joseph - possibly signed)
A Kind of Loving by Stan Barstow (1960 Michael Joseph)
Awakenings by Oliver Sacks (1973 Duckworth)

.

 

[steelyglint]

I found another copy of that 'star item' being offered. The price is a very nice £750 - I think we're going to get our second year in the shop.

.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

I found another copy of that 'star item' being offered. The price is a very nice £750 - I think we're going to get our second year in the shop.

.

Wow! Good for you!

 

[steelyglint]

I wonder if books are like stamps and the value of books with faults is actually higher for collectors?

Yeah, I do believe printing faults enhance collectibility (why else value first editions with more typos more highly than later, corrected, printings?) but it has to be manufacturing faults. I can't think of a single way damage through time and use can enhance the value of a book unless, to vary Bick's idea, Henry James spilled coffee on it - or, seriously, if he annotated the volume in the margins - a famous person messing up a book is valuable; an ordinary plebe doing it ruins it.

(I don't grasp the logic of collecting - I just want a book that's not missing pages and doesn't flop open to some particular page - basically, I want it to feel good in the hand and look good on the shelf and, beyond that, I don't care.[*] But that's my understanding of the actual state of "true" collecting.)

[*] That's from a purchasing viewpoint. On the other hand, whatever condition I get them in, I'm nearly fanatical about never making that condition any worse.

Well, and I hate highlighting/underlining and dogearing and stickers and spine creases and... okay, I'm a nut. But not a collector nut and this is OT, anyway.

My apologies for being the bubble-burster. Books are most definitely NOT like stamps as far as errors go. Any stamp collector would love to have the 'Inverted Jenny' mentioned by BigBadBob, but no book collector would have any interest at all in a tome simply because it had either a manufacturing or textual error.

There is a thing you see on eBay sometimes, involving Harry Potter books, where a misprint is claimed to make a book more 'collectable', but only poor gullible Potter fans ever fell for it.

A book collector wants a complete item (book and anything issued with it), in as good a condition as possible. The first appearance in print is usually the most desireable, though the hardcover is desired over the paperback even if the paperback arrived first. If there is a hardcover.

If errors held any interest for book collectors the prize item would be the uncorrected proof. These are collectable in some cases, usually where the hardcover first is inordinately scarce, but are just reading copies in the vast majority of cases.

So keep looking for errors in stamps. Spotting an error in a book gets you ten out of ten for observation, but doing it for a living would see you very quickly starving and homeless.

.

 

[J-Sun]

So keep looking for errors in stamps. Spotting an error in a book gets you ten out of ten for observation, but doing it for a living would see you very quickly starving and homeless.

Well, spotting an extra "p" in The Sun Also Rises would net you considerably more than a ten for observation but, no, a printing error won't make a non-valuable book valuable (which is the linked article's point) - sorry if I gave that impression. But that and other examples do work on the principle that "manufacturing error is rarer-so-more-valuable rather than damaged-so-less" which supports what I said (though that linked article does seem to fall off the rails with its last "examples"). But as I said, it ain't my field and won't ever affect me.

For those whom it might, maybe the most important thing is to say "don't throw away all books with errors as worthless" nor "spend fortunes on every book with errors" but to judge every book on a case-by-case basis?

 

[steelyglint]

There are lots of 'one of a kind' items around, some intentional, others accidental, but few have much in the way of value.

I have two or three myself. One is a book all about prospecting for various metals by an Australian chap. He made the book himself and sent it to his sister in England. He later got the book published in Australia, so there are copies out there. But there's only one like this one. Another is a limited edition of a very famous crime novel, the publisher of which swears he pushed every copy across a table for the author to sign and number. The copy I have has neither signature nor number, and the author is no longer in a position to comment. The third is a proof copy of an early horror novel by a fantasy author who lives nearby. The proof was made up by the publisher at the author's request and was the only one.

I have a typescript of a western novel that was published in the 1950s. I couldn't claim the 'unique' label for that as there was likely at least one other.

Sadly none of them have any great value. They're curiosities. The proof is just an addition to a collection of that chap's publications. The limited edition sits alongside another two that do have signatures and numbers. Right now I can't recall where the prospecting one is.

.

 

[J-Sun]

Did some book hunting Labor Day:

75¢ each at one of my favorite thrift stores.

Meant to reply to this earlier, but forgot: you beat me silly - my copy of the Weird Tales set me back four bucks. You'll almost certainly get to it before I will, so let me know how it goes. Even more so with the second one - I was thinking about picking it or a book like it up just recently but haven't gotten around to it.

On the other hand, (can't remember if I said anywhere) I did pick up the sequel to Ringworld for 49 cents, so that was pretty cool.

 

[dask]

Probably shouldn't mention this but the Weird Tales collection is in really really good shape.