I'm a bit of a bibliophile, and I think it's high time we had a thread for discussing rare and collectible books and showing off interesting finds. I know some of you folks have nice book collections. I've seen some of them.

I have mainly stuck with Sci Fi (primarily Gibson) for my initial topic starter here, but I'd love to see some cool old classics. I also collect Analogs and other magazines that have the initial publications of short stories that I like. I'm pretty into short stories. I'm working on collecting all of Bester's stuff mostly. I also have some PKD stuff and (as posted later) one Gibson.

I also needed someplace to fantasize. I've mentioned already the bedsheet Analogs with the Dune serialization that I've been lusting after madly. I also recently held in my hands the one very rare edition of Catcher in the Rye that has a photo of Salinger on the dust jacket. The story goes that he hates having his photo on books (can't imagine why, he's quite handsome - though perhaps that's why) and there was this one edition that slipped out. It was terribly expensive. I think somewhere around $200. But I shall own it someday!

Anyway, here's my initial contribution:

(all the images link to larger images. If for some reason you want higer res than that I do have it. Drop me an email.)



This is the edition of Omni (May 1981) with Johnny Mnemonic in it. It's a great kick. The ads and articles are cool, and the illustrations are pretty cool too. That photographer did a bunch of work in Omni apparently.



American first edition of Burning Chrome, and the back (as seen previously, linked below). I actually got this edition for US$50, which I thought was a marvelously good deal.

Russian First edition hardback of Virtual Light, which I've mentioned before.



Did you know Philip K. Dick wrote a kids story? It's young adult fiction. Very cute. I wish I could find a couple more copies for my kid sisters who are both the proper age and developing scifi/fantasy reading tastes.

And then the first paperback edition of Gravity's Rainbow. The cover's not damaged, the plastic covering over the cover is ripped and I just didn't think to take it off when I scanned it. The edition is lovely. The back cover says only "A screaming comes across the sky..." which is the opening line of the book. I have not actually read this sucker. I keep trying to, but it's a little thick for my taste. It was a gift from a very clever asshole who ended up getting laid. Man. I'm such a sucker.

Ok, unfortunately some of this has already been covered in the
Rare Book News thread over in News. I say unfortunately because I've been planning this thread for months and I'm miffed that someone beat me to posting that great jacket photo of Gibson (though I'm sure it's appeared before).

Another relevant link:

The case for Cayce as Alice over in PR w/ spoilers got derailed briefly into a book discussion that I was very excited about.

If there have been other relevant discussions, please feel free to link up. I've searched a bit and will post anything interesting I find.

Edit: I just modified the title of this thread. Am I allowed to do that? Is it in poor taste? Why must I always try to organize things?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: hurtstotouchfire,

Great thread!
The pearl of my book collection must be this: Lequeu. An Architectural Enigma (Actually in the original French, and bought at the publishing house in Paris in 1988). Except it has disappeared.
Two other favorites have gone two: a set of facsimiles of all existing Dada pamflets from 1914-1921, and another of all the issues of the journal G.
Well I can see this is more like a lament.
I still have some books, including some special and rare ones, but they would be too private to post.

Now that you ask, I can think of narey a book in my collection. Um.

My copy of the complete works of shakespeare more immediately comes to mind. It comes in two volumes and was printed over 150 years ago.

But it's in storage, which makes me nervous and a half. I'd much rather have it in my room, and soon again I shall.

Other than that... I'd have to go look.

Hmm. I have Andre Norton's Forerunner Foray. Does that count? I like it, and I've only ever seen it once. But maybe that's just me.

No. I don't really know what counts.

quote:

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Originally posted by hurtstotouchfire:
I'm a bit of a bibliophile

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Wow, you too?

They made me walk around to all the bookshops in Brissie when I moved here and tell them what I'd done.

I'd have to say all my signed shit. Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment, my entire haul of Matt Reilly, all signed, my first editions of Cussler's Vixen 03, Raise the Titanic!, and various others, 1st edition of Dale Brown's Flight of the Old Dog.

Screw you. They're important to me.

My signed copy of Jarhead: A Marines Chronicle of the Gulf.

My Gibson signed "City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City" on recommendation by him to examine it as influential to imagining "Night City" in Neuromancer.

Weblink Here

Gibson signed First Run "Neuromancer" graphic novel.

"The Samurai Sourcebook" by Stephen Turnbull

80's copy of Scientific American where they predicted that VR was going to take over everything. Jaron Lanier features predominantly as found of VPL Research. Who knew?

First and Last copy of "Next Generation" magazine. Probably the only fair reporting on the games industry. They never played favorites and called it like they saw it.

"Chaos" by James Gleick.

The Green Sky trilogy by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. This one was really hard to find since they stopped printing them almost 20 years ago.

I guess that I've never been a bibliophile, really. I have somehthing like 500 or more books in my apartment, but I buy them all for content, not provenance. I have owned something like 5 copies of neuromancer (starting with a first edition that had lots of stuff underlined and/or dog-eared)... but to me, I guess that as long as I can read it, its fine with me.

Though, I will say that I have some special-edition set of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Ed Gibbon. It is the entire 8 volumes w/ bibliography... all identically bound with their own little boxes to go in (in groups of 4). It is, essentially untouched and I got it for really cheap, so I think it may be the best single book-buy that I have ever made.

signed shit:
neil gaiman -- sandman issues #1 and 4 or 5, i forget, the one where death appears. and american gods 1st ed.
douglas coupland -- gen x and various odds and sods
poppy z brite -- lost souls, &c.

i donno. i don't set a great store by collecting books except for the reading value.

Reading this thread I was reminded of a story that made the bibliophile in me cringe.

My uncle had a friend who was always reading, but the books were often to big for him to carry around so he tore them into more portable sections. When he was done a section he would simply toss the book! It was as though he no longer needed the physical book after the information contained inside had been stored in his memory. It was very common to see him reading a shoddy torn up wad of paper on the metro and then watch him toss it on his way out of the station.

Seemed like a very cyberpunk way to go about reading books.

OMNI magazine... oh boy... still have a couple boxes full of those, in deep storage. That guy's illustrations haunted me. The one I didn't like at all was the one they choose for Burning Chrome, some face with a mustache.

Not so much as valuable but with laced with a high personal value:

- The Job, interviews ans short pieces by William Burroughs. A dog-eared, badly kept copy I found in a restaurant. It really jolted my then very young mind. And btw, right now it's missing from my shelves...

- Sellos del Antiguo México (Design motifs of ancient Mexico) by Jorge Enciso. A collection showing the incredible skill and synthesis capacity of old aztec, mayan, toltec artists. A great stalled-mind unclogger.

- A couple books signed by mexican writer and caricaturist Eduardo del Río, 'Rius'.

- Arzach graphic novel, signed by Moebius.

- And of course, signed Neuromacer and Count Zero paperbacks (I still wonder why didn't I took out Burning Chrome and MLO from the sack I was carrying? @#&!?), and the Idoru hardback (this one not signed to my name, though...).

Could name several other technical ones that really helped me; some MONDO 2000s, but I doubt they would fetch much in ebay.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: fuldog,

quote:

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i donno. i don't set a great store by collecting books except for the reading value.

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The grand majority of my books are not collectible, but with books I reread I like to have a clean copy and an annotated copy, that sort of thing. I only get collector's itch about authors that I really adore, primarily when I'm running out of work to read. Then I start going into alternate editions. Frequently it actually affects the feel of the story, which is why I like the magazines. The ads and the other articles give it a context that really changes the feel for me. I also like seeing Gibson's different cover girls, which is why I bought the Russian Virtual Light. Well that and having the fantasy of a Russian lover who will lie in bed with me and translate it, and then we can discuss the subtle differences from the English text.

The Alice in Wonderland manuscript facsimile discussed in the above-linked Alice thread was an awesome read. It was a very different experience than reading a modern, re-issued, typed book with non-original illustrations. That edition is one of my favorite arguments in the 'why does the edition matter' debate. Others include the UK edition of A Clockwork Orange, which has an additional chapter with a totally different ending, and the original short story publication of Ender's Game, which also has a totally different feel than the novel.

I don't actually tend to go much for signed books. They are, to me, perhaps monetarily more valuable, but they don't add anything to the reading experience. I will go ahead and get all my unusual Gibson books signed at some point or other, just because they'll make a nice inheritance, but I don't care much about it personally. I do value my paperback copy of Burning Chrome because I got WG to sign it "And they'll never let me forget it." (anyone know the reference?)

I do however very much enjoy the experience of getting them signed, and I think that's one of my primary motivators. When you go to most book signings around here, either the author's publisher or the book store host has a rule that if you have a book other than the promoting book to get signed you have to wait till the end. So there's this whole crew of us bibliophiles that show up early and hang around late, fondling our first editions and graphic novels and occasionally making exceedingly geeky chitchat. I love it. I sometimes end up running into old friends from bookstores that have gone out of business and whatnot, but who've come out of the woodwork to get their shit signed. It's like a social event.

Actually, it was in such a gathering that I first saw the graphic novel of Neuromancer Crash mentioned. It's very cool.

'why does the edition matter'

Aside from translation horrors, yes, different houses can make a book easier to read, to enjoy, or make it hard to get into.
Btw, this reminded me someone telling that the european hardcover editions of Quicksilver/Confusion didn't have the exquisite maps in the cover insides; now that would be a great loss. I enjoyed going back and forth from text to maps on those, and specially on the Confusion, where the globetrotting got really wild so the map is vital to create a mindview of the action.

I also like earlier editions because it's always a bit of a trip to see the old jacket art and read the original blurbs. I've got a really old pulp copy of Keith Laumer's "Bolo" that has a card cigarette ad bound into it. The cover price says $1.50, but I'm willing to bet it originally didn't sell for more than fifty cents in some discount rack. I like seeing how things used to be done.

quote:

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Originally posted by hurtstotouchfire:
I do value my paperback copy of Burning Chrome because I got WG to sign it "And they'll never let me forget it." (anyone know the reference?)

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I wouldn't be surprised if most people here know the reference. Wild Palms, in which WG himself makes a guest appearance as an older version of himself (and given it's only two years in the future I think that nature has been much nicer to him than those makeup artists were). I can't remember the exact lines but one character introduces him to another as "The guy who came up with cyberspace" and WG says "And they never let me forget it."

I don't collect books really, I just don't like throwing them out or selling them. But moving every few years forces me to purge my collection now and then. The books I treasure most are my tattered paperbacks of Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, my signed copy of Burning Chrome (thank you MD!) and my ancient hardcover trilogy of The Lord of the Rings, which I stole from my parents.

I guess to say specific books as "jewels" is a bit hard for myself, and maybe others. I treasure all my books and take great pains to make sure the spines are not cracked on my soft covers.

Other "Gems"

All of Rudy Rucker's works
The complete "Hitchhikers Guide to Galaxy".

Hard cover edition of "Musashi" by Eiji Yoshikawa. If you love Japan and love Samurai, this is the one to get and read. All 970 pages of it.

There was a large series called "Heroes in Hell" that had stories, written by various authors, about famous historical figures, literally, in Hell. It's of sentimental value since I read these when I was a pre-teen and learned alot about ancient history before actually studying it in school.

I think that I should mention the "moving" thing since Colin brought it up. It is a pain to move all those books with me but the one that I keep re-buying and own 4 paperback copies of is "Neuromancer". I read and re-read this in same way one dons a old pair of jeans or broken-in leather shoes. It makes one feel confortable and conforted. The only other books I have done this with are "Pattern Recognition" and the "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy"

i have a copy of this.

I just spent some time searching for my old copy of Burning Chrome with no luck, I hope I haven't lost it. I also cannot find Mona Lisa Overdrive, Count Zero.

If I have to replace these I want to look into getting nicer hardcover editions. Does anybody have a recommendations on what to look for.? I have never collected books, although I like nice hardbound books I didn't want to spend a lot of time or money on them. However you guys have inspired me. What should I look for? Where should I look? Or am I just being ridiculous and should I just buy a new paperback copy and shut up about it?

I'm not aware of any re-released hardbacks. There might be a hardback 20 year anniversary edition of Neuromancer.

Anybody know?

I'll poke around, dotherobot.

I was talking to a friend earlier about tracking down different editions of books. We were thinking that there must be some resource somewhere that lists all the editions of a book. So, I'm going to poke around for that as well.

There was a hardback rerelease of neuromancer at the twenty-year mark. Mainly interesting for the intro, and the corny pic of WG on the back with a "cyber" hand. Yeah.

The harcover of Neuromancer I have is the 10th anniversary edition. The 20th anniversary was released a few months ago, so that should be easy to find. The first hardcover edition was released in Britain I believe, and probably does not fit your criteria as it is usually the most expensive edition of Gibson's books when looking at what's available on the market. Burning Chrome HB always seems to hover at the $150 US range, but you can usually find cheap bookclub editions of Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. The Bridge books were all released in hardcover in the States and should be relatively easy to find.

eBay is a great place to look, but I would try and estimate the actual value of pristine first editions and then bid accordingly. No sense in overbidding, more copies always come along. I would guess there are plenty of used bookstores near Tampa, easiest thing is to just pull out the phonebook and call them all up one afternoon asking if they have any Gibson hardcovers for sale.

The main thing is to remain persistent, decide on a budget and then stick with it (or you could end up buying all kinds of 'cool' things related to WG), and avoid signed copies. They add too much to the price and you'll probably want to get them signed yourself next time he's on tour. Good luck!

Miscellaneous foreign covers I got a kick out of (Neuromancer far left):



Also an excellent example of why photos are best rendered as jpegs and not gifs.

And here's the hardback cover: