Tips and Traps When Buying for the Aspiring Book Collector
You may think that no gift could be safer or tamer than a book. Rare books, however, are a different beast—if you're planning to buy one for a friend, or to treat yourself, remember the advice that is always given about dogs: They are not just for Christmas. In Arturo Pérez-Reverte's thriller "The Dumas Club," the satanic book dealer Varo Borja declares: "Becoming a book collector is like joining a religion: It's for life."
All collecting is a disease, but lusting after rare books often strikes those without the bug as deranged. Unlike paintings or fine furniture, say, books are intrinsically mass-produced objects. What's more, you can look at a watercolor or a piece of porcelain without doing it any damage, but—according to the memoirs of the writer and collector John Baxter—a rare book loses $5 in value every time you open it.
There are customers who buy leather volumes—often bound journals or superseded encyclopedias—by the yard, and may well never have heard of Anthony Powell's novel "Books Do Furnish a Room." That is interior decorating, not collecting.
But there are almost as many ways into the field as there are collectors. The obvious first step is to collect a favorite author—though, unless your pockets are very deep, think hard about who that is. Writers who were commercially successful may have had larger print runs, but also tend to attract more people who specialize in their books. And if you like Graham Greene, John Dickson Carr, Philip K. Dick, Ed McBain or P.G. Wodehouse, remember how prolific they were.
Some genres, notably crime and science fiction, attract fanatical collectors, while the original readers disposed of the books like magazines, guaranteeing their rarity. Others collect lists: every book in Harold Bloom's "The Western Canon" or Cyril Connolly's "100 Key Books of the Modern Movement," say, or the winners of the Booker, Pulitzer or Whitbread Prizes. ...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203699404577045742554381490.html
You may think that no gift could be safer or tamer than a book. Rare books, however, are a different beast—if you're planning to buy one for a friend, or to treat yourself, remember the advice that is always given about dogs: They are not just for Christmas. In Arturo Pérez-Reverte's thriller "The Dumas Club," the satanic book dealer Varo Borja declares: "Becoming a book collector is like joining a religion: It's for life."
All collecting is a disease, but lusting after rare books often strikes those without the bug as deranged. Unlike paintings or fine furniture, say, books are intrinsically mass-produced objects. What's more, you can look at a watercolor or a piece of porcelain without doing it any damage, but—according to the memoirs of the writer and collector John Baxter—a rare book loses $5 in value every time you open it.
There are customers who buy leather volumes—often bound journals or superseded encyclopedias—by the yard, and may well never have heard of Anthony Powell's novel "Books Do Furnish a Room." That is interior decorating, not collecting.
But there are almost as many ways into the field as there are collectors. The obvious first step is to collect a favorite author—though, unless your pockets are very deep, think hard about who that is. Writers who were commercially successful may have had larger print runs, but also tend to attract more people who specialize in their books. And if you like Graham Greene, John Dickson Carr, Philip K. Dick, Ed McBain or P.G. Wodehouse, remember how prolific they were.
Some genres, notably crime and science fiction, attract fanatical collectors, while the original readers disposed of the books like magazines, guaranteeing their rarity. Others collect lists: every book in Harold Bloom's "The Western Canon" or Cyril Connolly's "100 Key Books of the Modern Movement," say, or the winners of the Booker, Pulitzer or Whitbread Prizes. ...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203699404577045742554381490.html
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