Confessions of a book hoarder

  • Thread starter Thread starter mdgspencer
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
Last chain I worked for was Waldens. No insight into profitability. I was only there for the employee discount. Worked for them roughly 3 years and was a favorite since I would close the store on weekends and didn’t care what I was paid. Waldens collapsed some years after I left.

First chain I worked for was B. Daltons, the small mall brand of Barnes and Noble, which was wiped out in around 2000. It was a similar relationship for me as with Waldens. Lasted 8 years.

Truth be told, I thought my reply about the profitability of running a book store was aimed at an inquiry about running a used book store.
 
Nobody’s around to tell me I can’t have more books. Instead, my age and my state of life are weighing more heavily against the time and opportunity I have to read many of the ones I already have.
 
I bought most for either reading/learning or reading/collecting. I collect certain authors, certain publishers, certain genres, certain subject matter, etc. That some might go up in value I knew, due to my years of experience in those markets (always remembering, as I told my customers, a book is worth what someone will pay for it). That was rarely why I bought a title. I’ve collected Chesterton for over 57 years, to the point that I own everything published in book format over his name (there are certain technical caveats there). I have no idea if anything has gone up significantly in value, in that case.

Since I hold almost all my collectible titles permanently, I’ve had years to watch them appreciate, depreciate, or just sit there. Didn’t matter a lot to me. And, being a fan, and often meeting authors, I can enhance my titles by getting them signed. Roughly 2500-3000 are signed, which can make no/little/significant difference in the potential sale price. A 1st ed./1st printing of a SF title I bought retail for around $26 and had signed is often listed for over $1000 in the current market.There are other ways in which knowledge and experience in the field can result in potential profit. Sometimes I have known what was being offered, but had no idea what it might be worth. Sometimes can get a pleasant surprise.

But so far, I’ve not sold anything, personally. All theoretical.
 
I too collect books by certain authors and on certain subjects. I’m an amateur cartoonist, and I collect books by certain cartoonists and in certain genres. In bookstores that specialize in such wares, there may well be dozens of titles that will appreciate in value in ten years or even less. Of such items I buy only the few that suit my taste, and I never think to look up their resale value. First editions and authors’ signatures are nice to have, but I don’t pursue them for their own sake. A reprint suits me fine, and it’s enough for me to own a copy of a writer’s work without expecting him to show evidence of laying his hand on it.

If I’m ever somehow obliged to sell all my books I’m sure I won’t get a tenth of what I paid for them. But so what? The pleasure is in the having, and the reading.
 
I wouldn’t make a profit on the totality of books. But I’d make out nicely on those I sold.

I’m not so much cartoon oriented, as comic oriented. Many books on comics/strip reprints. Some original sketches, some done for me at cons. Another collecting niche there.

Meant to say ‘Hi’ to Ernie, in my last post to you.
 
Well, I’m talking about cartoons in the broadest sense of the word, which covers everything from newspaper strips to comic books to New Yorker collections (and the animated kind, for that matter). I have collections of Peanuts, Pogo, Wash Tubbs, Dick Tracy and quite a few others. I’ve also bought everything I’ve ever found by Harvey Kurtzman, the creator of Mad magazine, although — now that I’m considering the Christian’s need to avoid the prurient in reading matter — I’m having some qualms about my copies of his work for Playboy. But that’s a subject for another thread.

Ernie says hi back atcha!
 
We have considerable overlap there. My comics/cartoons books total around 400-500+ titles (best guess). Very fond of the Library of American Comics titles, when I can get them at good prices.

Kurtzman was both the inspiration and the mainstay for the early MAD, though Gaines came up with the idea. I got reprints of the early years, #26 is the first actual issue I own and I started my own collection around #44. Kurtzman was a genius. Never met him, did meet Al Feldstein.

I was betting on the Nairobi Trio.
 
Last edited:
I could easily walk out of a comic book shop with an armful of the Library’s titles if I had the money and the shelf space to spare. I first found Kurtzman’s Mad comics in the reprints in the Super Specials that appeared in the Seventies, and enjoyed them even more than the magazine under Feldstein’s editorship. The entire run of Mad comics was reprinted in magazine format about twenty years ago, and I bought them all and still have them, by George.
 
FiveLinden said:
I didn’t realise you had to read them. I have always worked on the principle that if you own them you own the knowledge they contain. Is that not right?
Click to expand...
That’s what I thought until I noticed that I was buying copies of books I already had.
 
Last edited:
Oh, I like newer stuff and other formats too. I’ve mentioned The New Yorker and Mad magazine, and I’ve kept track of and bought work by younger cartoonists, though not so avidly in the past ten years, what with time, opportunity and inclination going against me. As for Eisner, I have some acquaintance with his graphic novels, particularly his first one, A Contract with God, and with his works of instruction. You can’t do much better in learning how to make comics than to read those.
 
I think I’ve got all the MAD stuff , until I lost interest in the magazine in the 70s.
 
Fun, wasn’t it?

I kept expecting my parents to crack down on my teenage MAD enthusiasm but they never did. Didn’t even comment when I started turning my jacket collar up in the back. Never got a DA hairdo, though.
 
I read Mad for three years in my teens, during the Seventies. I quit because I’d lost the taste for it, and later I put that down to growing out of it. Yet later, though, I read somewhere (can’t remember where) that the magazine’s golden era covered 1966 to 1975, and I’d started reading it near the end of that period. So maybe I stopped reading it because it wasn’t as good as it used to be? I dunno. I’m not so curious to find out as to recover all the issues I ever had and re-read them.

My parents never said a thing about my reading Mad. I don’t know if either of them ever saw the inside of an issue.
 
Nothing like savouring a new or even old book 😀
A few years ago there were plans I might move overseas and I parted with some old friends…plans changed and I miss those books now.
Many of mine are secondhand ,time seems to stand still in old book shops.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top