Recently I mused upon lazily collecting some of the chapbooks in the Little Books series from Borderlands Press. Having having owned one of the books for many years I happened to pick up a couple more. Perhaps that strange human characteristic of wanting to gather more of the same, I went ahead and looked for other books.
There are two limitations in this effort. First, my price threshold is fairly low; I don’t foresee spending more than $45 for a single book, especially given that these are small chapbooks. Sure, they’re limited to 500 (in most cases) copies, and are signed. But, is that such a big deal? Second, some are hard to find. I’ve checked the usual suspects like Bookfinder and eBay, and so far have been able to locate listings for all but 11 of the books.
What’s my ceiling here, I wonder? So far 53 books have been published. I now own 7, and possibly may pick up another 10-15 before I hit my price ceiling. At what point does it become an obsession? Probably never. To consider having less than half of the complete set is, to a completist, somewhat of a disappointment. The most expensive listing I’ve seen so far is $200 for (to me) an unknown author. There are two or three writers whose books in this series likely will never reach the market for less than $500. Is it then worth it owning a tiny piece of cardboard and paper?
As I’ve said before, I’m more of a haphazard collector when it comes to books. I want the ones that I can read, that fit my interests, and fall under a reasonable budget. My interests are narrow. Generally I’ll focus on authors I like, such as Jack Vance, James P. Blaylock, Tim Powers, Michael Shea, a few others. In a few small cases I’ve looked at publishers as an option. I own all but one of the Golden Gryphon hard covers. I considered trying to collect Arkham House or Dark Harvest, but many of the books from the former are beyond expensive. When it comes to the latter, I only really focused on their Night Visions series, where the only one I don’t have is impossible to find.
I read about other book collectors and marvel at their persistence and resourcefulness. To me there’s a certain joy in holding a rare book, but if there are multiple states, such as trade, limited, and deluxe limited, then I’ll happily own the trade edition. Slipcases, tray cases, these mean nothing to me if I can have the same book in a decent edition.
Actually, I’ve now seen one book listed for $295, which is almost ridiculous to me. Perhaps not to the avid collector, either someone who wants the complete set, or who collects that specific author. Today I saw a listing for the first book that I bought, so far back I no longer remember from whom or the price (likely at cost), for more than 7 times the original cost. Talk about an investment!
I’ll see your $295 and raise you to $450. The Malerman book is the most expensive that I’ve seen so far. Is this warranted? Not sure. I’ve never heard of this writer, but then again, though I’ve heard of many of the other writers in this series, I own few of their books. I guess my tastes are narrow to the extreme. No doubt the Gaiman and Ligotti books will exceed Malerman if they reach the market—at least I’ve heard of these writers…
The $450 now has been topped by $750 for the Neil Gaiman, listed by Half Price Books a few weeks ago. I guess they missed the Dark Forces book I bought for $8.49 that was signed by Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Bloch among others.