I found a nice essay in Australia's The Age about book collecting, coming from the mind of bookseller Rick Gekoski.
From the story...
Book collecting is, he concedes, a strange passion. "I put it down to a rogue gene." His specialty is 20thcentury literature, so the collectors who come to him are not even getting a beautiful or remarkable object; an early Joyce is not like a Gutenberg Bible or, for that matter, a contemporary painting that everyone could see and admire. "The first edition of a rare book usually doesn't look any different from the second, so why does anyone want to have it?
"Well, I think it has to do with a historical sense. This is what the book looked like on the day it was published. There is some pleasure to me, anyway, in holding The Great Gatsby and thinking this is what it looked like when F. Scott Fitzgerald saw it."
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