Today I'm handing over to Lynda aka Mozette of My Reading List who is going to tell us all about
'Finding a First Edition'.
Welcome Lynda
Finding & Caring For A First Edition
Books
are something that are beautiful and age well if cared for well. I have been collecting books for my whole
life – well, for as long as I can remember anyway.
And
if you’d like to find that particular book that is feeling elusive in your life
right now, I may be able to help you. By
following your own gut feelings and being very observant when you’re out at
markets and book sales, you can find yourself not only a bargain, but also a
book that may be out of print – or even a first edition – and you won’t know it
until you look it up on the internet or take it in to get it valued.
I
remember when I found my first out of print book. I was on holidays in the UK and doing a
huge Trafalgar Tour of the whole country for around three weeks when the bus
stopped in a little Welsh town for a toilet rest. Seeing we had a bus full of elderly people –
and only a few young people like myself – it was the young people who used the
facilities first. However, we then had
around forty-five minutes to wait for them to go through the rest of the bus
load of people. So, I asked if there was
a bookstore nearby and the tour co-ordinator pointed me in the direction of an
old theatre across the square. I told
them I’d be back within the forty-five minutes and took off across the
relatively quiet square. Once inside the
place, I found I had found I was in a renovated picture theatre from the early
1920’s. I climbed the stairs to the box
office and asked the lady there where I could find biographies and
autobiographies and I was directed to an old film room. It was cramped, had a slanted roof and I
couldn’t use the light switch and had to use a torch but the place was filled
with as many books as they could cram into it.
And as I scanned the room, I had two thoughts going through my mind: I
wonder what I can find in here in ten minutes and if anything runs over my foot, I’m outa here! Well, the light of my torch scanned across
the light yellow spine of a book, crammed into a bookcase full of dark brown
ones and I was pulled towards it; forgetting my fear of anything running over
my foot or me standing on anything that might be living in here. What I found was ‘The Letters of JRR Tolkien’
edited by Humphrey Carpenter in hard cover format. This book was published in 1981 originally
and I was about to sit down and look through it when the bookcase it came out
of creaked! Dropping it, I pushed it up
against the wall and wondered if anyone was around and called out for help…
fortunately, another woman was there and she thought I looked funny until I
told her what happened and she went to pick up my book off the floor to push
into the space left in the bookcase! I
protested and asked if she could choose another one…of course she obliged.
As
I walked up the stairs, though, I realised I had never seen a hardcover of this
book around anywhere, only paperback, so I offered them an extra fifty pounds
on the twelve pounds and fifty pence they had on the inside cover. The woman there said, ‘It’s just a book!’ I
offered more – one hundred pounds! – but she still refused. So, I paid the amount on the inside cover and
walked out of this wonderful store thinking I had ripped them off.
And
you know, I had. When I returned to Australia, I went into the city and got the book
valued in the city and found it was so rare that Australia
gained a copy and the UK
lost a copy of this book and it was worth around $1200 at the time I showed it
to the evaluator. Now, all these years,
later, its price can’t be put into a price tag… let’s just say that there’s not
that many around anymore. Now, I rarely
let anyone look at it, I have never read it, and when I do handle it, I use
gloves; and it never sees sunlight or hardly any light at all.
However,
after finding that one book, I didn’t think I’d ever find another quite so
easily. So what I did was not look for
them; and they seemed to show up where I was.
Now
that sounds really corny and stupid beyond belief, but after about a year or
so, I found that if you looked hard for a particular book you never found
it. But if you acted like it doesn’t
matter – but it does – it will find you, or show up when you least expect it
to. And the feeling you get when you
finally do lay your eyes and hands on that books that you’ve been looking for
all this time is like falling in love at first sight! This is a great feeling to have and the funny
thing is you get the feeling every time you look at your rare or out of print
book… there’s nothing like it!
After
finding your book you must be willing to care for it. There’s no middle of the road when you own a
one-of-a-kind book. You must care for it
or it will vanish from the world of literature as we know it… I know that
sounds really over the top and dramatic, but in today’s world of the internet,
e-readers and computers, it’s people like me who collect these kinds of things
that keep them not only in our world physically but also in our memories for
future generations to appreciate.
Caring
for these types of books takes only a little patience and the right environment
in your house. It also takes the same
amount of environmental changes to make your first edition books go from being
worth something to being worth nothing.
All
it would take is an infestation of silverfish, cockroaches or mice and you have
to flush a worthy collection of books down the proverbial drain; or even worse:
mould! The last thing you’d need is
rising damp and your books aren’t worth a single thing as they’ll smell and
look terrible as books – like us – are porous.
So, looking after your books is something you must promise to do, not
because you want to but because if you end up selling them to somebody, you
want to get the best price possible for them; you want them increase in value
not decrease.
But
if your book already smells, there are ways to get rid of that wet smell. I have found that locking the book in a
zip-lock bag with apple peelings and coffee grounds works. You have to change it over every few days as
this stuff will absorb the smells pretty quickly. I have been recommended this treatment for a
book when it came through the mail and it stunk of cigarette smoke when my
parcel went through a customs search in America and the customs officer was
a smoker. They must have breathed into
the envelope just before they re-sealed it and the smell of cigarettes was
trapped inside all the way here; and when I opened it here in Australia, the whole book was
permeated with that disgusting smell.
So, I used the coffee and apple peelings treatment for about a week and
the smell weakened a little over that time.
However it didn’t go away completely until around 6 months after I’d had
the book and I had to keep it separate from my main collection.
It’s
been some time since my first book landed in my lap by pure chance on a holiday
in the UK. And now, when I’m out and
about at second-hand bookstores, I’m always excited about which books I pick
up; just in case they are first editions, special editions or rare books or –
better still – signed copies. There’s
just something about these particular types of books that I love. They keep me going in search of another book
and yet another to keep this world of the written word alive and kicking in
some way; even long after it’s gone, I will still have a library of books to
care for and enjoy. And when I’m
gone? I have plans to give my first
editions to the State Library of Queensland if nobody else wants them so they
are kept in their archives.
Please do check out Lynda's blog: 'My Reading List' and let her know what you thought of her post.
Thanks Lynda for popping by.
I wonder, have you ever found a rare book?
If so, tell us its story.
If not, what book would you love to find?
