Re: Eaton Press, et al
- From: Allison Turner- <betonica@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 8 Jan 2006 08:29:40 -0800
on Sun, 08 Jan 2006 06:51:17 GMT, Willow Arune stated:
>Some Franklins can be had for half the original price. Many at only the
>original price at retail. I have yet to see one that has been read and
>suspect that those who buy them also buy tooled books by the yard.
Hey! I resemble that remark!
I was very amused several years ago on this topic; I'd been
browsing through old Victorian literature for a time, looking
for those books that would look nice on my shelves but not
quite admitting to myself that I was so shallow as to buy
books for my living room for their looks, rather than their
content. Then I found out that my mother has a complete set
of Shakespeare, nicely bound in red leather with gilt titles,
etc., with my great-grandfather's name also stamped on the
spines in gilt. IIRC, at this point only two of the volumes
have had their pages cut - one that my mother read many years
ago, and one that I read more recently.
Great-grandad bought books by the yard. Whaddya know. We
also have a photo of him with an impressive mustache; my
sister thinks of him as incurably vain - he apparently grew
the mustache for the picture, and then shaved it off. Mind
you, he was actually an impressive person. They still talk
about him in some South American high-mountain town where he
put the only railroad access in, and he also put railroads
throughout much of Western Canada.
But I was pretty amused that he'd been collecting books by
the yard, and haven't hesitated since to do so myself.
Well, I won't exactly spend a lot of money on it, mind, and
I'd like the books to have some sort of content that I might
want to read someday. I've bought, over the years, 11
volumes of Gryphon Edition Classics of Medicine library,
most at the bottom end of the price range so that I might
even be able to sell them again without a loss (including
the postage I paid). I don't think of them as brilliant
investments, but they might be tolerable. Mostly they look
nice on the shelf, and might be useful. Two of them, in
fact, are books I very much want in my collection, and
which I'd never be able to afford as originals (Withering's
_An Account of the Foxglove_ and Cullen's _Materia Medica_,
both of which are classics for those of us studying/teaching/
etc. botanical medicine).
I see various volumes from CoM on eBay a lot, for prices
ranging from ~$10 to ~$50 or more, and I'll buy them at the
bottom end of the range if someone else doesn't outbid me.
I don't know what their price new was; does anyone else?
Mostly, though, I prefer the originals. What is it about
the new leather bindings from these "collector" editions
makes them inferior to a well-bound older leather book?
-Allison
.
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