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Whats in your collection? hey everyone! Who here loves to collect old printed books. They can be from anywhere, by anyone. I have two collected essays books by Ralph Waldo Emerson. They are dated 1920! Also i have a Very beat up Macbeth-Macmillan malriculattion english text dated 1933
what are you collecting?
boys!!! lol
actually my collection is barbie dolls. kinda childish, i know.
I have "The Pleasures of Life" (pt. 1 & 2) by Sir John Lubbock (1887).
A collection of "Milton's Poems" (1899).
I have a few old books, including The Complete Works Of Shakespeare (1896), Poems Of Sixty-Five Years by William Ellery Channing (first edition, one of the transcendentalist poets, 1901), The Complete Poetry of Shelley (1900), The Poetry Of Horace (1909), hand-bound copy of Sonnets From The Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger (first edition), Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1908), Longfellow's Complete Poems (1906), and a few various signed books by Ricardo Sternberg, Dr. Martha Henning, and William Stafford.
I have an entire shelf dedicated to my collection of tiny pocket sized books, including a set of twelve smallish volumes from the 19th century containing Shakespeare's complete works. I also have a beautiful first edition of the Wizard of Oz (1900) and a lovely collection of older editions of the OZ series from my grandfather. I've got facsimiles of the first folio of Shakespeare and of the Kelmscott press edition of Chaucer's works (which is absolutely beautiful), and I've been slowly collecting the Arden editions of all of Shakespeare's plays, but those aren't old or interesting "collectibles." The oldest written documents I own are a legal indenture from the eighteenth century, which is beautifully penned on a huge piece of vellum and a really great Spanish emblem from the 17th century. Someday when I'm actually earning money I'd love to own a book, or at least a document from my period in the 16th century, but I can always cure my incunable fix by running over to our special collections or to the Newberry, which really means I have access to an incredible book collection (at the Newberry for example, I can walk in any day of the week and ask to see Shakespeare's first folio and, voila, they just hand it over for hours of perusal in the rare books reading room. :))
:D wow, some of these are really great! Barbies eh?? hmm are they classics?
This thread makes me feel somewhat immodest, but Petrarch's Love's post reminded me of a few other 'nostalgic' books I have in my mini-library: The Æneid by Virgil (1928), The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer (1899), and The Complete Poetry Of Chaucer (1930).
My prized possession is an autographed 1st addition Deliverance by Dickey.
I've got a couple of charming old hardcovers/first editions sitting around that I have either bought, or, some I inherited from my grandfather and grandmother (replete with her margin notes and doodles! my grandfather was less, uhm, expressive about his studies :lol: )
no publish date but inscription is `A Happy New Year My Dear Hec, Jan. 1st. `[18]97' in a Henry Altemus copy of The Reveries of a Bachelor by `Ik Marvel'. Some of the little sketches are titled; "Over a Wood Fire" and "Over His Cigar"
undated (I hate it when they do that!) but told it's 1901 T. Nelson and Sons edition of Henry Seton Merriman's The Last Hope
1909 Macmillan pocket classics, Charles Kingsley's The Heroes
1923 Chatto & Windus, Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay
1927 Macmillan pocket classics, Charles Dicken's Tale of Two Cities
1928 Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet
1939 Chatto & Windus, Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
1952 Chatto and Windus Ltd., W. Somerset Maugham's The Narrow Corner
1953 Collins edition of W.H. Ainsworth's Old St. Paul's
:nod: EXCELLENT :nod:
:lol: I kind of think Asa was referring to books, but yeah, I have some of those too. Few and dear. My sister and I had a great big family, which was rather crazy....Quote:
Originally Posted by amanda_isabel
Anyway, there's lots of old books around here somewhere, lot's of old things... I really don't know what there is, because most of it is packed away. Have some old fiction, and old Bibles and hymn books in Norwegian and German, and yeah...
hmm i have nothing like that so i'll just list some of the old books i have lol
i got a 1928 edition of hugo's works
a 1942 "thesaurus of anecdotes"
a shakespeare's works book which i have no iea what it is
and a short stories paperback bookfrom the 40's
"there's lots of old books around here somewhere"
A 1709 collection of George Herbert's poetry,
A 1777 volume containing two novels - Zayde, translated from the French, and Oroonoko by Aphra Benn,
A French-English dictionary 1768 and an English grammar in Spanish 1791,
A heap of books from the 1800s and another heap of early 1900s stuff and so on.
I don't collect, but I like browsing in second-hand book shops, and I rarely leave quite empty handed as I think they need encouragement, expecially as the internet is killing the trade.
Obviously, finely bound books and some first edition books can be quite (very) expensive, but generally old books tend to be cheap enough - I got a first edition copy of Prisoner of Zenda (Arrowsmith 1893?) for under five pounds last year - less than a new paperback edition would have cost. My first American edition of Karen Blixen's Out of Africa (Random House 1938) came from the $1 tray (although the bookshop, in Philadelphia, where I bought it may have been a ghost shop, as I never managed to find a trace of it again.)
Inscriptions - I guess these lower the value of books, but I am delighted to read that my Book of Days, was given to Mary Inglis on January 1st 1865, and I have been intrigued for nearly fifty years to know who was Goff who gave Binks "Pioneer Stories all round the Compass" in July 1918.
I'm not a collector, but if you are throwing out any of Anthony Hope's less well known books, or pre-1900 song books I might just have space on a bookshelf to squeeze them in.
wow 1700's that's old
Most of the classics that I buy are the paper back barnes and noble edition. But my collection will be of used/antique/hardcover books...the ones I have read in paperback. The reason for this is I am a very messy college student, and my poor books get thrashed. But as of right now, even my paper backs are stored in the garage...my hardcovers will come when I have room to put my shelves back up. My first hardcover collectible will be Dracula.