I wonder if the author has come across such marks?
I also take umberidge with the idea that digital books are more convenient. A physical book is more engaging, more beautiful, more real and more present than a digital book. All things that I find convenient when I want to interact with knowledge and art. Horses for courses I assume.
The main point of interest is that physical items age and retain artifacts of their lives. I found a childrens book that was discarded from an American library where a girl had scrawled in pencil that she was proud that she finished it. I've seen one which was awarded to a man for being top of his class in college in the early 1900s. The bookshop I used to visit once had a book sold to him which contained a letter from Rabindrnath Tagore in the original in between the leaves of the book.
It's a fascinating feeling and quite primal.
Glenn Horowitz built a fortune selling the archives of writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and Alice Walker.
Different collectors buy different things- some like books owned by specific people, others want works (drafts, letter, editions, etc) of an author.
Pristine is for some, a book that's been lived in is worth more to others who look for margin notes.
They’re damn bulky, though, especially when there’s an alternative that weighs nothing. Damn bulky.
I'm still not sure if my children for example, understands that when I'm staring at an iPad I'm almost always reading a book. Does a vast library in iBooks translate to them as well as the same library on physical books in a bookshelf in the house? My sense is it does not.
And when I'm gone, will anyone find any interest in my iBook library? In its highlights and notes? In the books I've read and re-read dozens of times?
Some of my fondest memories are going over my older or deceased family members' book shelves. I have never, however, gone over anyone's tablet. Part of that is because it's newer, but something about the browse-ability of an e-book misses the mark. I can't see which book is worn from being read and re-read, or brimming with notes and scribbles. In digital, it's hard to tell which books that person found significant, but in physical it's obvious by the condition (or even number of copies) of the book.
I have a copy of "New Rules for the New Economy" by Kevin Kelly, signed as part of the Global Business Network that he and Steward Brand founded a long time ago.
Having read Fred Turner's immensely great book "From Counterculture to Cyberculture", that is a valuable little piece of history to me.
It's amusing to read that, for on one side of my family, scribbling in a book would be considered a most heinous crime! I keep any writing to the flyleaf if the book is a gift, but don't otherwise write in them. Another thing that complicates the matter in my family is that we have always been serial second-hand book buyers, and in such a case a book's physical condition is not necessarily an indication of how much it was loved by its immediate previous owner. On the other hand, my grandmother tended to insert relevant newspaper cuttings into the book for the benefit of future readers!
I love the ambiance of libraries and used book stores so I tend to buy books with a little wear and tear and appreciate their uniqueness.
At the same time I'm loathe to make my own marks in books. I hadn't thought about that contradiction before.
Also the Agaton Sax comedy detective stories, and the largely unknown Uncle the elephant books by JP Martin.
The thing is, I've had a number of instances where the paper copy of a book was so poorly typeset (usually overly long lines on too-wide pages, e.g., _The Inklings and King Arthur: J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and Owen Barfield on the Matter of Britain_ edited by Sørina Higgins) that I actually purchased the e-book version so as to be able to read it comfortably.
Your grandmother's idea sounds wonderful, though.
Otherwise, very much in agreement!
My favorite is a copy of Martin Thornton’s The Function of Theology, which had been deaccessioned from the library of the Seminary of the Southwest at some point. I happened to flip to the back to glance at the loan card. It had been borrowed precisely one time—October 23, 1987—but it had been borrowed that one time by a priest who became a friend of mine in 2021 during a course at a different institution. The small world of Anglican theology! I texted him a picture of the book, and he still remembered checking it out.
I don't mind most marks from previous readers. Usually I'd rather have them than not, as they're at least interesting in one way or another.
The category of used book with annotations that I don't ever like to buy is one where a previous owner highlighted or underlined seemingly half the book. There's a kind of reader out there who must highlight or underline their books the same way I compulsively select text as I read on a screen, and it wrecks the book.
I love heavily marked up used books. They make me feel a kinship with another person. Me and "Dan" from 1956 have physically held the same copy of Terman's Electronic and Radio Engineering!
My favorite book I've gotten from them was A Psalm for the Wild-Built, which was previously a library book, funny enough.
Of course, this has the advantage of keeping prices down for those of us looking for those other editions and conditions, but it can at times be rather perplexing. I was once in an auction where it was evident that the auctioneer was also surprised by a case of this: in an auction with a first edition by an American trade press, and a first UK edition from a year later by a particularly notable private press, with a smaller print run, typeset and printed by hand by notable historical figures and friends of the author, and an estimate of around four times the first trade edition... the UK edition sold within estimate, and while the first edition sold for significantly more than the UK edition, vastly over its estimate.
In another case, I had a bit of trouble finding sellers online who even noted the edition of a particular 19th century book in its description if it was not a first edition, despite the second edition being at the center of a significant historical legal drama, being nominally banned and ordered destroyed, and making a mess of British blasphemy law in a case where no one, including both the government and the prosecution, wanted the publisher to be found guilty.
My guess is that many book collectors will set a particular goal, for example, collecting first editions or author-signed copies of a particular genre, set of authors, etc, and will follow that goal, rather than acquiring individual books for individual reasons.
More generally, collecting communities often seem to fall into purely seeking rarity, placing the highest demand on the items with the least supply regardless of why the supply is small. Thus at an extreme in book collecting, for example, you have collectors who see entirely uncut pages as being preferable, despite it making the book unreadable. I have a friend who is fond of antique pens who expressed disappointment that in seeking the rarest pens, the community often ended up placing the highest value on the worst: the pens with bad designs that didn't work well, the variants and colors that were particularly ugly, all the models that sold very poorly and were quickly discontinued, and are thus rarer.
Probably not, but nor will anyone else find interest in your physical library. One's collections are invaluable to oneself, but usually uninteresting to anyone else.
I donated hundreds of books when I cleaned out my parents' house. Most probably ended up in a dump or recycled.
You can't lose your place easily. Lighting isn't an issue if you buy a backlit model. Reading lying on your back or side is much easier. Traveling is easier with an e-reader. Access to wikipedia and the dictionary on the same device.
There are emotional reasons that I like paper books, but if I'm just trying to read, give me an ebook.
Depends on the clientele. I love finding ex-Bohemian-Club-library books, for example, because they are absurdly well cared for. My most recent one of these was a copy of “San Francisco's Ocean Trade Pᴀsᴛ ᴀɴᴅ Fᴜᴛᴜʀᴇ — A Story of the Deep Water Service of San Francisco, 1848 to 1911.” (1911) because I was very familiar with the coming of the railroads but not so familiar with anything earlier than that: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/San_Fran...
Loved the bit about one of the early steamships used to carry freight up and down the Sacramento River getting outclassed by an ox team — moo moo moo https://i.imgur.com/GVCVY0r.jpeg
If the medium makes the difference between me reading a text rather than not reading that text, I tend to think that makes it functionally "better".
1. A biology text book which is how I learned about sex! 2. Children's Britannica World of Science & Mystery "FUTURE CITIES" which inspired my love for the future and technology, and still has pride of place on my bookshelf. I even wrote a lil thread on Twitter about it [0]
Future historians will curse the 19th and 20th centuries for switching to acidic paper. Thankfully more and more books are printed on acid free paper via ISO 9706.
> Ні! This might seem a little out of the blue and it is but a few years ago at a library book sale I got the book "Pi in the Sky". It has your personal library stamp on it, so I guess YOU got it at a library sale and then re-donated it? I had never read anything about math before that was at all interesting and it got me reading lots of other "popular" math books and I got really interested in number theory. I am now a freshman at CMU and planning to be a math major!
[1] https://archive.org/details/engineeringwithn00plowrich/mode/...
There is a charity bookshop in my city that exclusively sells ex-library books from the city's libraries. It's very tempting to buy the books there due to them usually being in very good condition.
This isn't every US book though, seems to be mostly the fiction kind. The tech books I have are US-printed and are holding up perfectly.
But yeah the acidic paper thing is real and a big problem. The book I’m currently reading has these rust-like vertical streaks covering every single page. I don’t know how to recover or preserve them.
I discovered this in a scanned collection of old books maintained by our government ministry of culture ...
there are comments on some pages (see pages 8, 11, 17 for example) including the cover. in some places the scribbler who seems be an authority on the subject himself expresses some rebuttals/commentary on the text's shortcomings
Book Title: Vocabulary of Gentoo and English
link: https://indianculture.gov.in/rarebooks/vaokaaabaularaii-apha...
PS: this was the first time I stumbled across, and discovered that "Gentoo" was another name used by the British for the "Telugu" language of Southern India. I am a native speaker of Telugu and I never knew this fact.
