My Secret Vice

[Mnemosyne]

Originally Posted by Mithadan

Alatar, a good place to look for Tolkien collectibles is at the sales libraries sometimes hold to get rid of old books. That's where I picked up a 1st edition of the Hobbit (in rather poor shape).

This is especially true for The Hobbit in America now, at least if there are any beautiful old illustrated versions. In a classic case of the road to Angband being paved with good intentions/the pesky government muddling its hands in other people's business people are no longer allowed to sell (I forget if there's a policy on libraries or not) books with illustrations made with lead paint--which, I should add, has never caused lead poisoning in children (unlike houses with paint in convenient bite-sized peelable chunks), all because of that scare of lead-painted toys coming from China a while back. The law wasn't made to cover books, but it has, which means thrift stores everywhere are pitching their old illustrated books. I should hope that old The Hobbits are recognized as collectibles, though--the one loophole in the bill that means saving old books.

For me, though I'm not terribly keen on getting newer and newer editions of LotR (I have my one-volume beaten up/annotated by self copy and my Red Red Book for prettiness' sake), I do get rather obsessive when I find odd-looking copies in used bookstores (the more beat-up, the better). It's not so much a sense of packrattishness as it is the delusion I hold of "liberating" these neglected books from their slow, unreadable decay. If they're especially odd (i.e., getting a UK edition from a used bookstore when LotR was still published by a company with the name "Unwin" in it) I'll hold onto them; otherwise I try to keep them as "I don't particularly care if you return them or not" loaners as I try to corrupt more people into the goodness that is Tolkien.