Some people collect books out of compulsion: odds and ends, with no order to their accumulation.  We have our issues, but to call it a compulsion is a stretch.  Unlike many of our bibliophilic brethren, we can actually sell a book from time to time and are somewhat choosy where and on what we spend our money on.  I think that our current library sits at about 1,200 volumes, equally split between history and fiction.  With the purchase of our home and my subsequent attempt to return all the period architectural details and furnish the living room as the original owners might have done, I have started to gather a few editions that could have been found in our home that first Fall.  I have 1928 editions of:

Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle,
Hermann Hesse – Steppenwolf  (German edition)
Erich Maria Remarque – All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
Virginia Woolf – Orlando: A Biography
Margaret Mead – Coming of Age in Samoa
Agatha Christie – The Mystery of the Blue Train
The Common Book of Prayer
Felix Salten – Bambi: a Life in the Woods (Bambi. Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde)
Herbert Asbury  – The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld
André Maurois  – Disraeli
T. E. Lawrence  – Revolt in the Desert

To add weight to the our pre-stock market crash collection, I been on the search for a complete set of 1909 Harvard Classics, the 1917 Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, and a set of the 1910 11th edition set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, as this is THE edition to have (for the Über-booky folk).  All taken together, this will give our parlor a true sense of period nerdiness.  None of the above volumes are particularly pricey ~ $6 each in decent condition and ALL of them are available for download since enough time has passed that the works are in the public domain.  The wealth of information contained in them isn’t the sole point for wanting them; it is also their tangible quality – the faded bindings, the smell of their paper, the care taken with the block-printed illustrations…  These are all books that have witnessed the same history as our little home and deserve a safe and revered place there.

This past weekend we attended the bi-annual Friends of the Seattle Public Sale, where we usually pick up some Travel Lit, a few mountain climbing related tomes and the odd cookbook.  Well, on this trip I hit the motherload!  I found 14 mountaineering books that are on my “List” and in the Sets and Rare Book Room I happened upon a complete set of 1910 of the EB.  I may have swooned.  I snapped up those bad-boys faster than a lawyer cashes a check.  The set is of Ex-library stock and there is some serious shelf wear on a couple pieces, but nothing that would keep them from being used for another 80 years.  For a grand total of $33, I walked out a very happy little hobbit.  I will work on the rest of the list as further opportunity presents and as time and money are available.

A few notable biblio-quotes:

“Anyone who has got a book collection and a garden wants for nothing.” & “A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
-Marcus Tullius Cicero

“The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den”
-Phillip Adams

“I cannot live without books.”
– Thomas Jefferson (in a letter to John Adams in 1815)

“With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person’s character. “
— Nicholas A. Basbanes