That Japanese Neuromancer cover is cooler than the other side of the pillow.

[edit: Sorry, HTTF, didn't mean to roll the page over so quick after you posted. Everybody go back to page 1 and see Hurts's obscure book covers.]

boog from the hypertext edition...where the hell did you find that mr. clown???

quote:

---

I have come to tell you that you are free. Many ages ago, My
consciousness left man, that he might develop himself. I return to find
this development approaching completion, but hindered by fear and by
misunderstanding.

You have built for yourselves psychic suits of armor, and clad in them,
your vision is restricted, your movements are clumsy and painful, your
skin is bruised, and your spirit is broiled in the sun.

I am chaos. I am the substance from which your artists and scientists
build rhythms. I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh
in happy anarchy. I am chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are free.

---

Wow, you guys make me ashamed to even mention what I thought was a pretty good collection of firsts. Modest, but pretty good.

I live in such a small place, that I'm forced to cycle my collection (of all my books, not just first editions). So I can't name them all off the top of my head.

All the Gibson books first edition, if I remember correctly, except Neuromancer. But I have the 20th re-issue. A few Vonneguts. A Stephen King. Richard Kadry, I think.

But, I don't collect books in terms of "first editions", I collect hard covers of books I love, so they'll still be around for... for... uh, the. kids. I. don't. have?

Ye-ah. So anyway, I usually get a first edition if I can, if it's a book I really love. If not, I'll settle for any old hard cover. Except Book of the Month Club editions.

As far as I'm concerned paperbacks are pulp. Pulpy. Made to masticate and dipose of. I used to collect paperbacks, but now they're more of a nuisance, except to read. Definitely easier to read. Much handier. But not keepers.

Paperbacks are just not meant to live.
I bought Finnegans Wake as a paperback, and when I finally got round to trying to read it after some 5 years, it had auto-destructed! I mean, I hadn't even opened the goddam thing. I'd rather buy a 2.hand hardback, if I had the choice, but one doesn't always.

I have a few odd, prized books, including a small number of extremely narrow-focus railroad histories and retrospectives, and I just remembered that I own this one. Not actually having seen it in some years, I decided to root around and see if I could find it. Took five minutes.

Steam-engine otaku:



Published in 1979. One press run, only a few hundred copies, as far as I know. Originally sold for $4.50 US. I bought the last known copy on Earth, pre-Internet, anyway, from Motorbooks in England for £3.95. That was probably in 1990. Searched it up this evening quite by accident (google often leads me to links to searches- weird), and found it selling for upwards of sixty US dollars. Decided I had to find it in my bookshelves again.

Anyhow... I certainly didn't buy it to resell it; I simply like tiny geared steam locomotives. And there are probably less a thousand people in the English-speaking world who could recognize and name one of these particular locomotives with certainty if they saw a picture, a model, or the real thing. A slim book with a very narrow scope indeed.

A keeper.

quote:

---

Originally posted by hydra:
boog from the hypertext edition...where the hell did you find that mr. clown???

---

a hippy type neighbor i used to live next to noticed my near obsession with all things illuminatus and gave me her very old copy as a gift.

quote:

---

Originally posted by M:
Paperbacks are just not meant to live.
I bought Finnegans Wake as a paperback, and when I finally got round to trying to read it after some 5 years, it had auto-destructed! I mean, I hadn't even opened the goddam thing. I'd rather buy a 2.hand hardback, if I had the choice, but one doesn't always.

---

you ought to see my paperback "Ulysses." so, so thrashed.

while i wish nearly every book i own was hardback, i rather like paperbacks. they are cheap. they are convenient. and withoot them, a sickeningly large amount of literature would not have made it into my life because it would have gone oot of publication long ago, or been published in too small a number to have reached me.
i'm not really concerned with editions other than what covers i like or if it's an author i especially dig.

i don't have much in the way of rare first edition stuff or collectables, save for a decent chunk of sci-fi pulp from the 50's, 60's and 70's numbering close to 200, including 20 Ace Doubles. (two stories, two covers back to back in one book) i don't think i'd want any of those in hardback given a choice of one or the other. the covers are brilliant, in an abstract style you no longer see anymore. i also share BlueShift's sentiments aboot liking to see how things used to be done. a great big 35cents in the top right hand corner.

and matthew, my collection contains 17 Andre Norton titles, including Forerunner Foray.

this is not my book, but it is the same cover. (adapted to softcover and with stylized text similar to the Breed To Come cover, which i do have) there are others here.





all this talk aboot cycling and paring down book collections for the sake of space frightens me. i'd rather get rid of the fucking furniture.

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

If it makes you feel a bit better, the move that really reduced my book collection also reduced my furniture collection to zero (not that it was large to start with).

And since then I only get rid of books that suck.

My last move I threw out most of my furniture and kept all the books.

I have a lot of 'em but, as with signed copies, if I have any hardbacks, rarities or early editions I only have them by accident. As long as the book is in reasonably good nick I'm more likely to buy a cheap paperback than an expensive hardback - and for non-fiction, which is mainly what I read, I'd rather have the most recently updated edition than the first. It always bugs me when I buy a book and then they put out a revised version.

I was given a first edition of a Rider Haggard novel The People of the Mist - I don't dare read it, it's 110 years old. The oldest book of mine I've actually read is a large volume of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, printed in 1935. (Like this one, and clearly not a collectors' item.) It belonged to my grandfather.

Did I mention I was a bookbinder for two and a half years? Nothing fancy, more factory work, truth be told. But I am intimately accquainted with the structure of the book. Moreso commercially produced ones.

God I loved that work. And I managed to work every station, started out in rounding and backing, then sewing, typesetting titles and gold stamping, making covers, and casing in.

You could spend a lifetime perfecting the craft.

There's nothing like a completely hand-made book though, and they're rare and expensive. Hand-made paper, printed, and bound, all by the same person. What a work of love.

If I could do that, I'd have a difficult time choosing a book for the project.

If I ever get a garage or basement...

Just last weekend, tidying up a little, found several eons-old paperbacks: Asimov, Clarke, Vance. Old favorites, which I did read again and again in my youth.
Even while they're in a dry, safe place, the glue has gone on most of them, or become so brittle that opening them up causes the pages to break free. A couple got some mildewy smell. Some pages seem to have shed quite a lot of ink; the characters on the pages begin to resemble something being typewritten with no ribbon installed (does that make sense to all present here? : ) )

I have quite a few paperbacks and pulps as well as a decent chunk of scifi magazines. They're all in good shape and perfectly readable. How you store books makes a huge difference, especially with cheaply-made books and paperbacks. I have a couple of magazines that are starting to lose their bindings. There is also a certain manner that you can staple them that won't really damage anything, and there are a few kinds of glue that you can use that won't screw up the paper long-term. A few of my Analogs have been reinforced by well-informed booksellers, but they're all pretty whole. The only one I have that's starting to lose pages is my oldest, a 1952 Astounding.

The book most special to me is probably by Paulo Coelho: The Alchemist. Not because it's a rare first print or anything of the sort, but because it was given to me by somebody that means the world to me.

First prints are nice and all, but given the choice between the above and oh say, a Neuromancer first edition, i'd go with the Alchemist every time.

Alchemist is a beautiful book. Like Catch-22, I make the effort to read it at least once a year.

I just started collecting - I'm too ashamed to post it's five or six contents in this thread.

Ah, well, size isn't everything.

I would have posted this in the thrift store thread, but it's been archived.

Just bought all 6 volumes of Kindlers Malerei Leksikon from 1971 for the whopping price of €10 total!!!

A little bit of water damage, old library stamps, but otherwise in good condition!

Score!

A signed Advanced Readers Copy of _IDORU_ that I picked up in Abingdon, VA, a first of _God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater or Pearls Before Swine_ and a 1904 copy of the I.C.S. Reference Library _Arithmetic, Formulas, Geometry, and Mensuration, Masonry_. They're worth something to me.

books, hmm... sigh* i look around my place and think as to how i would like to actually have fewer books... sometimes i manage to let afew go.. hard to do though.. the covers i have seen posted here are just so fine, Retro complementary colors, and not so complementary. all new to me.. i do small collage's of my favorite covers and make luggage tags for for my fellow sci fi reading brethern and self outta those little plasticky kits at the dime store (reduce a good thing on a color copier) I don't take good enough care of my books though for any one to want to collect them after I have drug them about with me for a bit.

AN uncensored original english version of Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho with a sticker from the 'Original SOHO Bookshop' on the front, where I actually bought it.

(just a picture I found on the net, might make one of mine if I find soem time)


A friend of mine wanted to order the book from Amazon.De where it was listed. (Back then it was hard to get english books, and Amazon was a rising star.)

Two day's later he received an e-mail from Amazon telling him that "unfortiunatly we can not deliver your order because it is listed on the German Index. But if you wish, we can deliver the German translation."
- yeah, sure.