Collecting Books By Authors You Love

David Baddiel, for the Times Online highlights why you should only collect books from the authors you love.

From the story...

While I was briefly in the market, Rick Gekoski, the former Booker judge and bookseller, showed me a copy of a first edition of Lolita that Nabakov had given as a present to Graham Greene and in which, on the inner flap, Nabakov had written a short message adorned with a butterfly. Looking at it made the goosepimples rise on my flesh. I'm not sure anything else but a book could contain such a microcosmically expressive thing: and somehow, for that to work, it matters that the book is a first edition.

The lesson I've learnt, I think, is that if you do fancy collecting books, best to forget about speculating, and just to think of a first edition as a kind of totem. Just get the ones, in other words, by the writers you actually love, and keep them.

Indeed. Just starting out collecting, after I received as a gift a first edition Jack London book, I went nuts, scouring used book stores and Ebay for ANY first edition bargain. I got a lot of Anne Tyler books, for example, on the cheap. This isn't to say that Anne Tyler isn't a good writer, oh no, it's just that I will probably never ever read an Anne Tyler novel and yet, there on my shelf, quite a few Anne Tyler first editions.

And, really, EVERY title had a first edition at some point. There's no way one can collect first editions without slimming down and specifically targeting your book collecting search. Yes, I CAN afford that first edition of Dean Koontz' Beastchild, but, uh, why do I want it? I don't read Koontz and even if I kept it in hopes that it'd go up in price, who would buy a first edition of Beastchild anyway? A Koontz collector, I imagine. But where does one FIND one of those people?

That said, give me Jack London and John Steinbeck and throw in a few Hemingway's to boot. That'll keep me occupied for some time to come.