Book-collecting musings from a lifelong bibliophile

I caught the book-collecting bug at an early age. Growing up in Boston, I found our apartment filled with them—the teetering stacks at every turn. Henry Miller mingled with Virginia Woolf, Julia Child, and Kurt Vonnegut. Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys nearly bricked up an entire wall on their own. Books were exchanged on birthdays, on whims, and at holidays—with Christmas always leading the pack. Our family’s nightly post-dinner ritual was to race to our rooms to read. When we moved out of our family home in the spring of 1990, roughly 1,000 books were sold, after each one had been carefully laid out on blankets on the front lawn. We practically cried. Books were heavy and wouldn’t travel well. The few that escaped the sale—such as my copy of The Little Engine That Could—were privately socked away. That’s when my life as a book collector began in earnest.

Fast-forward to that summer. I was 22. Every weekend, I started riding my bike to local yard sales—the perfect place to stumble upon all manner of interesting, and sometimes collectible, books. At the very first sale, I peeked into a box to find a dozen pristine copies of Saul Bellow’s Herzog (weird, I know), which all turned out to be book club editions. This fact only came to light because the owner kindly told me so. He’d mistakenly bought them while thinking they were first editions. He also happened to be a rare book dealer whose house was sinking under the weight of books—some of which needed jettisoning. He suggested that I obtain a copy of Collected Books, an encyclopedic price-guide/how-to tome about book collecting by Patricia Ahearn and Allen Ahearn. He also said to request book catalogs from booksellers who carried my collecting interests. (This was all pre-Internet, of course.)

I quickly began to read tons of books about books (a collecting genre in its own right). I discovered points of issues, proofs, off-prints, limited editions, and foreign editions. There was so much more to learn—too much—but I kept at it. Questions arose, though. How would I collect my favorite authors in their entirety? Should I go global and include British editions?

Weekend book foraging extended to library-step book sales, to local bookstores, and to book fairs at the South End Church. I also went to the Brattle Bookstore after school to see what new stuff had come in for sale. There was an endless array of resources for filling in the gaps in my collection. As a result, I managed to hone my collection over time to cover a few select areas, which were Irish poetry, Pulitzer Prize–winning novels, and favorite fiction writers (Milan Kundera, Thomas Mann, and Philip Roth).

In Collected Books, the Ahearns advised collectors-to-be that having a book signed by its author increased its value. For me, having an autographed copy somehow brought the author closer to their book—the volume that I happened to be holding. Thus, I discovered signed books. Boston, with its deep literary roots, had hoards of famous authors coming through to either lecture at local universities or to read from their latest books. These events were all listed in the Sunday edition of The Boston Globe, so I would eagerly tear out the book section and plan my strategy to attend as many as possible. I must have gone to hundreds of readings over the years.

Today, the Internet somewhat obviates the need to search all over creation for a hard-to-locate item, but you still need to know what to look for in terms of condition, edition, pricing, and seller reliability. Much of this information can only be learned from careful study, but that is so worth the effort. Doing so will not only cultivate the collector in you but will also enhance the wonder of books and the thrill of finding what you never knew existed, until you had it in your hands. Good luck in your collecting endeavors.