From owning 26 books over a month ago, I’ve added only four more to my collection. Although there are—to date—53 books in the series, I am hampered by two factors: first, few of the books that I lack are available on the market, and, second, I have a self-imposed limit in terms of what I want to spend per book.
The second factor has prevented me from acquiring several more books, as these are outside my self-imposed budget. To put it bluntly, there’s no effing way that I’ll spend over $75 for a slim volume, by any author, let alone the hundred being asked for certain authors.
I wish now that I’d known about these books earlier, though ironically, even had I known about them when they were published, I likely would have hesitated as when many of these first appeared I would have balked at the price anyway.
This isn’t to say my resources now are unlimited; my budget is firm, which means I’ve hesitated on multiple occasions to buy certain books that are on the market. Maybe they’ll never drop in price. Maybe certain titles will never appear. C’est la vie, as they say.
There are certain of my collections, so to speak, that will remain incomplete. Such is life: it is imperfect. I lack a book or two here or there. Lacking over 20 in the Little Books series is no different than lacking multiple hundred Arkham House books, for example. In two cases I lack a single volume in a series, and in one of these cases the volume I lack just never seems to appear for sale anywhere. When it does, it’s the “signed/limited” edition at what I’d term insane prices.
If one or books in the Borderlands Press series ever does emerge and is within my budget, I’ll try to pick it up, even though I know that there is no way I’ll get them all. I don’t think I care at this point. The Gaiman and Ligotti books will forever remain out of reach, as will the earlier ones. Malerman and Hill—both in my opinion are overpriced, but I can say that for a dozen others. The market may disagree, as someone appears to have handed over $750 for a book listed on a website recently. There are maybe three more volumes that I’ve found on the market that I might be able to acquire. That takes me to 33 books of the 53 published. This means than 20 or so books are out of reach, which seems like a huge number, as it’s almost 40% of published books at this point. When I reach my limit, will I still care? Will I still check various book seller sites to see if any are listed that fall into my price range? Maybe I’ll keep checking, but I doubt some of these books will come down in price.
It was fun while it lasted.
