The Complete Guide to Book Collecting

Chapter 1: What Is Book Collecting and Why People Love It

Let's start by clearing up the biggest misunderstanding about book collecting: it is not the same as reading. You will read some of what you collect, sure, but the hobby itself is about the study, acquisition, care, and arrangement of books as physical objects. A collector picks up a book because of its binding, its edition, its author's signature, its history, its rarity, or simply because it's a beautiful thing to hold. The reading happens along the way, but the collecting is a different kind of activity entirely.

So what does it actually look like? Not glamorous, at least not at first. It often looks like a Saturday morning spent in a musty used-book store, squatting down to scan the low shelves beneath the "Fiction - General" sign. It looks like squinting at the copyright page to check the publication date and edition number. It looks like pulling a battered paperback off the shelf, smelling it (old paper has a distinct, vanilla-and-dust scent that most collectors can recognize instantly), and then putting it back because the spine is cracked and the pages are brittle. It looks like a lot of putting back.

But then, every so often, it looks like a small victory. You find a first edition of a book you love at a garage sale, priced at two dollars. The dust jacket is a little worn but intact, and the copyright page says "First Edition" in the