Best book bargains?

[mal4mac]

What's the best bargain you have found from booksellers? Mine was, and still is!:

# William Shakespeare Complete Works
# Jonathan Bath & Eric Rasmussen
# This stunning new edition, commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, combines the very latest textual scholarship with illuminating insights into how Shakespeare's plays were and are performed.
# £7.99
# RRP: £50.00
# Save: £42.01

http://www.thebookpeople.co.uk

Note - I have no relation to these booksellers, apart form buying some amazing bargains from them! They often have "10 classic novels for £10" deals.

Another good seller is "Book Depository". They usually beat Amazon's price on Amazon, and beat it even more on their own site! Always quick, always excellent condition.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Ha, I ordered the same book yesterday. I got mine from Amazon at £9.99 (inc delivery) it does sound an excellent copy, my old Collins edition is getting a little tatty so I thought I would replace it. I like it that the notes are on the page, like Arden editions, so you don't have to keep flicking to the back. So I am hoping that this book is going to be one of the best buys.

Others would include Oscar Wilde's complete works, which I believe I got for about a fiver years ago and is still in great condition and probably a collection of Hemingway novels which I bought together for under £10.

The most expensive book I have ever bought is Oscar Wilde's complete letters, which I paid around £50 for, and that was a second hand ex-library copy! It's out of print so I had to pay the asking price, the original price when new was £35. I don't go in for first editions so that is the most I have paid for a single book.

Another valuable book, in terms of how much I have gone back to it, is Beginning Theory by Peter Barry. I have used it a great deal during my studies, and even though it is getting a bit basic now (it is beginning theory after all) I will still dip into it from time to time. It is good to remind yourself of the foundations of each theory before building upon that with other material like the Norton Anthology of theory and criticism which has also been a good buy, though I haven't used it quite as much as I thought I would.

I also picked up a slim poetry anthology called A Little Night Reading for peanuts which has some excellent work in and a great mix of stuff too. Thinking about it, all of the second shelf of my second smaller bookcase is full of the old 99p Penguin editions of classic works, really how can you go wrong with those? Of course they don't sell them editions any more, unless you happen to bump into them in some smaller outlets, but all those are a real bargain. I have dipped into and read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (and Dorian Gray in that version too) more times I can remember from those editions, really great bargains, shame on Penguin for charging £7.99/£8.99 now in the black cover editions, though they have some good notes at the back and usually the small introductions at the front are quite readable, I still love the old editions best I think; nostalgia probably.

[alicepalace]

I got a lovely blue cotton hard bound copy of Pride and Prejudice, never been touched really. I got it in bundle from a charity shop, £1 for 3, so it cost me 33.3p :) Very happy.

I buy the majority of my books from charity stores so I tend not to pay more than £2 for any of them.

[mal4mac]

Ha, I ordered the same book yesterday. I got mine from Amazon at £9.99 (inc delivery) it does sound an excellent copy, my old Collins edition is getting a little tatty so I thought I would replace it. I like it that the notes are on the page, like Arden editions, so you don't have to keep flicking to the back. So I am hoping that this book is going to be one of the best buys.

This might be my best buy ever. Good to hear that Amazon have caught up with the price dropping. Although it's worth full price. It's my main new year resolution to read it cover to cover. I'm up to Twelfth Night and it's going well. The footnotes are really good. I have the Arden Hamlet, but on my latest re-read I preferred the RSC - the Arden just has too much detail for me. I prefer more text than footnotes!

[DanielBenoit]

As I mentioned in another thread, I got the Complete Works of Shakespeare dated 1909 at a garage sale for $5 :eek:

[LitNetIsGreat]

This might be my best buy ever. Good to hear that Amazon have caught up with the price dropping. Although it's worth full price. It's my main new year resolution to read it cover to cover. I'm up to Twelfth Night and it's going well. The footnotes are really good. I have the Arden Hamlet, but on my latest re-read I preferred the RSC - the Arden just has too much detail for me. I prefer more text than footnotes!

Yes it does look a good buy, though it was touch and go with the Arden edition as I quite like Arden, I have Othello in the Arden edition. The RSC has a lot more pages of further reading so that helped to swing it for me, but both are very respected editions, but this, along with the price just swung it in the end. I don't know what to do with my poor Collins edition, I'll probably just keep it as a spare.

That's a good resolution, there's a few of the lesser comedies and some of histories that I have yet to read myself.

[Drkshadow03]

Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac
Silas Marner by George Eliot
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

from a used bookstore (20% off already used book price): total $10. So about $1 a book. Oh sure, they're low quality paperback, but since I'm only going to write notes in them anyway . . .

The crown jewel in this purchase is of course The Handmaid's Tale (http://www.amazon.com/Handmaids-Tale-Margaret-Eleanor-Atwood/dp/B001IC52I4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252961426&sr=8-1), which sells for $11+ used on Amazon (not including $3 shipping) and $16+ new. In the other used book store Handmaid sells for $7 (without a 20% discount). I basically paid a dollar for this book!!!

[stlukesguild]

Speaking of newer books my best buys tend to be art books. I've got a number of Konemann art books for less than $15 and just the other week I got the volume on The Art of Islam for $7.99. These books are all over-sized, 500 or more pages, weigh about 15 pounds each, and re packed cover to cover with high quality photographic reproductions of art and architecture. I've gotten the books on Florence, Venice, Rome, The Romanesque, The Gothic, Neo-Classicism and Romanticism, The Renaissance, etc...

My best buys, however, are certainly older books I purchased in used books stores. I got a lovely set of books of the poetry of St. John Perse, a modern French poet, hard-bound, beautifully printed, and translated by poets such as T.S. Eliot and W.S. Merwin. The whole set was about $5. For $8 I got a 19th century edition of the collected works of Tennyson with a beautifully tooled leather cover, gilded pages, and intaglio print illustrations. The best buy, however, was of a stack of Verve and Derrière le Miroir magazines for about $4 for a whole bag. Verve was a high-end French arts publication from the 30s and 40s that included marvelous art reproductions and original writing by authors such as Joyce, Hemingway, Proust, etc... Derrière le Miroir was a print publication by Maeght publisher offering original book prints to the collector. Each edition of either publication included a number of book lithographs and/or book linoleum prints. A book litho/lino is a print produced directly by the artist and printed from the original litho stone/lino block for inclusion in the book. It is exactly the same as an original print by the artist except that it is editioned in a higher volume to fill the run of the magazine and the signature in in the actual image and not added by hand. As a result, I actually own a number of original prints by Matisse, Joan Miro, Chagall, Kandinsky, and others... for $4!!! I didn't know the worth of these prints until recently. I had assumed they were simply reproductions and actually had several taped to the walls of my studio... and a few taped to the walls in my classroom::brickwall. One day, however, while browsing on line I came upon the very prints hanging on my walls and discovered that the Miro prints were selling in galleries for upwards of $900 and a Matisse image after his famous painting, Dance, was selling for $1800! :eek::eek::eek: Needless to say... they were rapidly removed from my walls and are now safely stored away. At some point I'll get around to properly framing them for display once more.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Bloody hell! That is some good luck, you should definitely get them framed and put up on display.

[mal4mac]

The RSC has a lot more pages of further reading so that helped to swing it for me, but both are very respected editions, but this, along with the price just swung it in the end.

Yes the essays at the beginning of the RSC Complete, and before each play, are also excellent. They tell you just enough to enable you to read the play with enhanced enjoyment. They aren't the 'chunks of scholarship' that the Arden longer notes so often are. Plus they avoid Arden's never-ending accounts of quarto variations and similar boring details. I'm finding it difficult to forgive Arden for calling their longest, most detailed, edition of Hamlet "the playgoers edition". It has the most fussily detailed notes of any edition I've ever encountered and should be called the "pernickety, gradgrind scholars edition".

[LitNetIsGreat]

I can't believe it the book has arrived already, guess what I'll be reading tonight? :banana:

[kasie]

What's the best bargain you have found from booksellers? Mine was, and still is!:

# William Shakespeare Complete Works
# Jonathan Bath & Eric Rasmussen
# This stunning new edition, commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, combines the very latest textual scholarship with illuminating insights into how Shakespeare's plays were and are performed.
# £7.99
# RRP: £50.00
# Save: £42.01......

I was really envious when I saw this for sale through TBP - I thought I had already had a bargain with it. The RSC theatre bookshop had it 'reduced' to £30.00 and Waterstone's had it at half-price in their Stratford store but I could not face carrying it home in my luggage so I let it go. Then Waterstone's reduced it further still on-line and by the time I had used my accumulated points with them, it came to something like £17.35, post free. A couple of months later I saw TBP's offer but I thought it was for the PB version and I thought maybe such a mighty tome would not survive long as a PB.

I find it useful to read the background to the plays before seeing a production, as well as doing a re-read. The notes, as you and Neely say, are not too heavy and the format is easy to read, though it is definitely a 'sit at the table to read' volume - no longing in an easy chair with this copy!

I shall be turning to The Winter's Tale in the next few days as the friends I am visiting next week tell me they have tickets for us to see a 'modern' production at Southampton's Nuffield Theatre - should be interesting.