I have moved all my posts and extraneous items on this blog to my own server. The new address: A Gently Mad Blog

I will still be blogging about books, collecting, and everything that is intertwined with being a crazy book person.

So please change your bookmarks (yeah like MY blog is bookmarkable) and the RSS feed address will remain the same if you have subscribed through Feedburner.

There are many stories out in the book collecting world that tell of a collector going into a used book store and coming out with a very rare very valuable book for only a few dollars.

It happens. More infrequently now, but it does happen.

Rhymes of a Red Cross Man was a book that my Aunt have given to me as a present one of my birthdays. Maybe about 7 or 8 years ago. I don’t recall. I doubt she purchased it for more than five dollars.

She had purchased it because I was into military history and I suppose she felt that I would enjoy it. If I remember correctly I did like it as a gift and did not think much of the possible value of it as a collectible book. I had just begun to collect books and I was not well versed in how to find out information on books and their value.

Fast forward to about two years ago. I was putting together my book collection in my computer and I need to find out the value and some information on Rhymes. so off to ABEBooks.com I went and I was pleasantly surprised.

It seems that the first edition of this book, which mine is, could fetch about $350 dollars.

So see sometimes that dollar or two dollar find in the used books store might be a nice little surprise.

Now about the book.
You can see the larger version by clicking

The book was published in 1916 by Barse and Hopkins. The author, Robert Service, was considered the “Canadian Kipling”. This is the First US Illustrated Edition hardcover. This post dates the First Us Edition that was issued in a less ornate package and was unillustrated. The First Canadian Edition was printed around the same time.

The book was issued without a dust jacket. But on the cloth cover an illustration appears. My copy shows slight rubbing on the spine and a few frays on the top of the spine. Otherwise the binding is loose but intact with minor splitting. The pages are off color slightly but the illustration plates still contain vibrant colors. The tissue paper that covers each plate is still intact.

Here are a few pictures of the interior illustration plates. (click for a larger version):

Here is an example of the tissue paper over the plate with a quote from the adjoining poem:

On the overleaf there is an inscribed name, not the author’s signature, of James S Harvey, 1918. More than likely the first owner of this particular book. Usually an owner’s inscription would devalue the book but since this is just a name and not a large inscription I woudl only deduct a few tenths of a point in grading for it. Plus, it is really neat to see the name of the first owner from 1918 inscribed in the book.
Click to see the inscription

Overall this book is in very good to very good + condition (more on grading later). On a scale of 10, I would grade this book a 9.1.

I am really starting to like this little book. Every once in awhile I pick it up and read a poem here or there. They all seem to be very good. I really wouldn’t know since I am not too versed in poetry other than a few particular poets. But this book will remain in my collection for some time in the future.

I will be adding a new little feature here.

I will take specific books from my collection, photograph them, and write up an entry on them.

The entry may be about how I came about the selected work, or why the work is important to me, my collection, or the overall bibliophile world. Probably all three for a few of my books in my collection (if I am lucky to have at least one of those books).

Collecting isn’t just about the book and filing it away. There are stories to the book you purchase or find. I hope I can shed a little light on my personal collection as well as show off some great books.

I finished Blindsight by PETER WATTS the other night and I was blown away. This guy can write.

I have picked through Parasite Rex : Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures at the bookstore and I finally purchased a copy. This book was referenced by SCOTT WESTERFELD as a inspiration for his great novel Peeps. Carl Zimmer does a great job at writing about science in clear and easy to read prose.

I have never read a CHINA MIEVILLE book, ever. I picked up King Rat from Earthling Publications. I have made it through 32 pages last night and I can tell you that I think I am going to like this book. Mieville’s prose is dense but easy to read. That may sound like a contradiction in terms but it fits.

A recent announcement from a small press in the horror genre has brought upon a great debate about how publishers should handle their business with regard to limited editions. I will discuss the idea of limited editions and small presses in a later entry and I will not editorialize about this publisher and his decision.This is not the blog for that.

However it has brought about a great opportunity to discuss Editions. Little thought is put towards editions by the average reader or book buyer. Collectors, as in many other instances, are a different breed. They thrive on what edition a book is. Along with condition, where it came from, and who owned it prior to the purchase, the edition and printing are very important.

First Editions are just that. They are the first impression of a book that is sold to the public. The ABBA has a great definition

All of the copies printed from the first setting of type; can include multiple printings if all are from the same setting of type. Every printed book has a first edition, many never have later editions. A later edition would have substantial changes in the printing plates or type such as the addition of a new preface or new chapter or major changes throughout the text and often is printed from a complete resetting of the type. When book collectors use the term first edition, they are usually referring to the first printing and if there are different states or issues, the earliest of those.

There can be a First US Edition, a First UK Edition, a First Limited Edition and so on. These three are probably the most significant First edition labels. There are certain publishers that might state on the copyright page that a certain book is the First Harcourt Edition. This is virtually meaningless unless that edition was the first to ever hit the stands.

For collectors the First US and the First UK editions are the most important. A subset of collectors may find the First Limited Edition as important. But those are a breed of editions unto themselves.

Depending on when the UK or US edition was released determines which is the True first edition. Some are simultaneously released some are released first in the US or the UK. When the book is released at the same time most collectors would value the edition from the country of origin of the author as the more sought after edition. Some would put equal weight and want to acquire both.

All books go through at least one edition and one printing. This means that the book is set and printed for a specific number of copies. Say 5000. When this first printing of 5000 is sold out and the publisher wants to bring more product to the market they can do two things; They can resend the same setting back to the printer and print another 5000 copies or they can expand, contract, alter, or make changes to the book then send it back to the printer.

If they do the former this is called a Second Printing. If they end up doing the latter the edition changes and that becomes the Second Edition of the book. This usually happens more with nonfiction work than fiction. Though it does happen with fiction. A quick example is THE STAND by STEPHEN KING. Its First Edition came out in 1978 King added back the excised text and was produced again in 1991 as Uncut and Expanded. Really, it was the Second Edition.

Back to the ABAA for a excellent definition of printings:

[Printings]include the copies of a book or other printed material which originate from the same plates or setting of type. If 500 copies of a book are printed on Oct. 5 and 300 copies are printed from the same substantially unchanged plates on Dec. 10, all 800 copies are part of the same edition. Printing: the copies of a book or other printed material which originate from the same press run or from the same plates or setting of type at one time. In the example given for “Edition” above, the 500 copies would be the first printing and the 300 copies comprise the second printing. In the 19th century some publishers labeled later printings as if they were later editions, i.e. a second printing would be called a “second edition” on the copyright page.

There is something called a State of a printing. A State is something that is rather interesting. As the book is being printed and the Printer notices a mistake, alteration, broken or misaligned type setting, or something akin to that in this digital age, he would stop the printing and reset the setting and continue the job.

The books that are printed after the correction are considered the Second State of printing. Usually no one cares unless it may affect the value of the book. First and Second states of a first edition can vary in value depending on the book in question.

From the ABAA site once more:

. . .a portion of a printing with changes such as minor alterations to the text either intentional or accidental; insertion of cancels, advertisements, or insertions; copies on different paper without intention of creating a separate issue; and other changes other than folding or collating or binding. An example would be when a pressman discovers battered or broken type, stops the presses and resets that portion of the page by replacing the broken type and then resumes the printing.

Variants are something minor when it comes to editions.  A variant is based on mostly cosmetic changes between books printed in the same edition and same print run.  Those differences could include different dust jackets (like the second edition of GOOD OMENS by NEIL GAIMAN and TERRY PRATCHETT), end papers, binding, or other cosmetic differences.

What about Advanced Readers Copies? Or paperbacks?  Trade paperbacks? Book Club Editions?

How about I discuss those in Part 2.

Sources:

ABAA Glossary

I haven’t put up a recommendations list in some time. I think I’ll work on one this weekend and post it.

My reading has slowed a bit. I cant’ say why but maybe it has something to do with catching up with a stack of magazines like Outside, Wired, Runners World, Scientific American, and a few others.

Right now I am reading Blindsight by Peter Watts and I just finished putting out the debut issue of Horror Literature Quarterly which I may say has some great stories by Kealan Patrick Burke, Nate Southard, and Shane Jiraiya Cummings. The second issue will be out in July.

The rest of my time has been taken up by slush reading, forming Gently Mad Press, Inc.(and working on the website).

I was up in Toronto for WHC 2007 which was a great time. And I picked up some cool items to add to my collection. I’ll post about them later.

And just like the tumblers in a lock events occur that make me purchase more books.

I was contemplating placing an order with Neil over at Clarkesworld Books since he is closing up shop and he needs to get his inventory moved. Who am I to not help the guy out.

This order would have been for most of the Earthling Publications stock he has. I was not completely convinced I would make this purchase until well into the spring. Until one of those events happened.

I get an email from Neil saying that my pre-order is in and that he was getting ready to mail it out. I had two options. Email Neil back and confirm and thank him or email him back and tell him to hold the pre-order since I would be ordering some in stock stuff in the coming weeks. I chose the latter.

I knew Neil would hold it and I knew I would be ordering. Then it hit me. Why wait a few weeks to place the order since you know what you want. So over to Clarkesworld Books I go and I place the order consisting of most of his Earthing Pub stock.

That third option is usually the reason why I have more books than space. And why I need to build custom cases.

Why wait?

So here is my purchase list from that moment of weakness:

• Home Before Dark (The Collected Cedar Hill Stories, Vol. 2) by Gary Braunbeck (Hardcover) and Volume 1. (Which it looks like I snagged the last one.
• American Morons by Glen Hirshberg (Hardcover)
• World of Hurt by Brian Hodge (Hardcover)
• King Rat by China Mieville (Slipcased Hardcover)
• Song of Kali (20th Anniversary Edition) by Dan Simmons (Slipcased Hardcover)
• Pressure by Jeff Strand (Hardcover)

I think the one thing that has come out of this is that I am now on the quest to complete my Earthling Pub collection. Add that to obtaining all of what Cemetery Dance has published and I think I have my hands full (and my wallet empty).

Technorati Tags: clarkesworld books, earthling publications, cemetery dance, book buying, book collecting, small press horror books

    A few posts ago I spoke of On the differences on Collecting and Reading. The last line of that post “Up next I’ll take a look at the collector and how he does a service to preserving books and culture.” reminded me that I wanted to write about how collectors preserve the written word and at times save literary traditions from going extinct.

Nicholas Basbanes has a great series of books about collecting and collectors. Among the Gently Mad, Every Book Its Reader, Patience & Fortitude, and Gentle Madness. In each volume Basbanes looks at a few collectors that have made it their mission to save books from obscurity. Patience and Fortitude goes deeper into this sub-culture of collectors and explains how book collectors over the centuries have preserved the written word.

Without collectors the 33 known copies of the Gutenberg Bible would have been lost. All the illuminated manuscripts written prior to the movable type press would be gone. Shakespeare’s published Folios would be dust. Rare editions of 19th century works would not have been around to reprint affordable editions that schools purchase so new generations can experience Moby Dick or The Last of the Mohicans (ok so collectors apologize for hours of boredom this books produces in its readers).

When people complain about collectors buying up all the copies of a work and accused of not doing it for the love of the story it reveals a willful ignorance of what book collectors do.

Yes collectors are there to collect the rare, the old, the solid investment. We are also a bit mentally unstable because no matter how many books we purchase for the “investment” we purchase five others because we love books. We all may not be setting a goal to preserve some authors work but by extension we are doing what those bibliophiles in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries were doing.

I cannot fathom the number of books that have disappeared because they weren’t collected and slowly each copy made it to the land fill and fell apart and the manuscript was lost to time. I would guess that a large portion of those books weren’t worth saving. But even if a very small percentage were worth it, we have lost some valuable books.

As It Pertains to Money and As It Pertains to Longevity in Literature and Collections.

A certain idea has been running through my head the past few days pertaining to the speculation of the price of a specific book or edition and whether it is some how immoral to speculate on such things. Is it some how immoral to speculate on the financial gain or loss of a specific author, book, or publisher? Does the after market price of a certain volume increase or decrease the value of the work as literature? Is the person that speculates on price of a certain volume doing some irreparable damage to book collecting, reading, rare book markets?

I plan on looking at the financial speculation side of book collecting as well as a certain type of speculation in book collecting which does and does not have something to do with monetary value of a volume. This type of speculation concerns the longevity of authors, publishers, works, or specific books as collectible based purely on their contribution to their specific genre. Though value of a author in terms of absolute dollars in the collectible market and the author’s value as a contributor to the specific field of literature go hand in hand a collector could focus on speculating that Author A will be more valuable in aesthetic terms in the future without contemplating Author A’s monetary value at all.

To speculate on an author’s longevity is one part of collecting. The collector wants to create an impressive collection. In doing so she wants to have authors and books that have made an impact on the world. Some collectors like to have bragging rights to an author they predicted would be a heavy hitter in the future. Some like to say they got in on the ground floor, per se, before a specific author became a “must have”.

In my next few posts I will be taking a look at both meanings of speculation.

At times some people comment about “collectors” who just buy books to collect them and not read them. Those same peopl at times seem to have virtrol in their voices about those of us that buy books to “just” collect them. I enclosed just in quotation marks to show that these detractors of collectors somehow place upon collecting books some form of sitgma. The “just” they use in their discussions of collectors, to me at least, seem to signify that collectors only buy and not read. And somehow that is antithesis to what books are for.

Collectors of books are a rare bunch. They know deep down that they will never be able to read every book that that purchase. I believe this is one of the first indications that you may be on your way to being a biblioholic. Reading books is not like watching a movie or a television show. Reading takes time and effort to accomplish. Unless you are Harold Bloom. But even at my fastest reading I can maybe get through 6 books a week at the most. But my average pace is somewhere around 2 to 3 books a week. Even at that rate it comes out to about 150 books a year.

Last year I finished just under 80 books. So it looks like my average rate of reading has decreased. Even if I read 80 books a year I could not possibly read everything I have in my library at this moment before I died.

There are collectors out there that probably do not read at all.  I suspect that it is a rare few.  Most of us that love books love reading them.  That is how we all started out.  Collectors, as a whole, can be considered readers but readers cannot, on whole, be considered collectors.

Collectors do not read their books that they may consider rare or expensive.  This is just common sense.  Why pull down your first edition copy of Moby Dick to read when you can read a paperback version.  Preserving the rare book is a part of collecting and there is nothing wrong with purchasing a book because of its rarity or its price and not reading it if a less expensive edition is available. However, people seem to find this pretentious or wrong. I strongly disagree with this sentiment and offer this to those detractors.  Reading is reading.  Reading a third printing would be the same as reading the first printing.  However, the probablity of that first edition being ruin, damaged, destroyed, spilled upon, or any other horrible happanstance increases each time that edition is taken off the shelf.  So why endanger a rare copy of a book just so you can say you read that specific edition?

Readers tend to think that collectors are some elite asshole that only speculates on the collectability of a certain volume or author. That collectors don’t read and that those limited runs of books should go to more deserving “readers” and not collectors. The most vocal “readers” tend to focus on the print run of a limited edition, say 300 copies, and complain that with print runs that low how can they find a copy to read if the “evil collectors” buy all the copies. Would those readers complain if they new that all 300 copies went to readers and not collectors who were just faster on the draw and ordered before them? No they wouldn’t. I am conscious of the fact that I am tossing a blanket statement out but I see more and more people bring up this subject and take collectors to task for collecting without quite understanding that collectors are, more often than not, readers.

The difference between collecting and reading really comes down to what the individual wants out of his book collection. A collector wants the rare, the limited, the better binding, the better quality, etc. At the same time the collector will read, in a limited capacity, those rare editions. However, the collector will purchase reading copies of his books so he can read them and enjoy them as a work. Readers on the other hand do not care for the edition, the binding, the rarity, etc. They ust want a copy they can read and enjoy. Collectors bare them no grudge but for some reason “readers” seem to hold “collectors” in distain.

Up next I’ll take a look at the collector and how he does a service to preserving books and culture.