Book collecting upate

-
Yesterday was a Saturday and we had some free time so we popped into Burton upon Trent for a couple of hours (just because it's nearby). Well the inevitable happens - there are charity shops that have books so I go for a quick trawl.

Well yesterday wasn't the most successful but I did find a few. so here's the list

Dan Simmons - Hyperion (B format)
ed. Ben Bova - Exiles (3 novellas by Poul Anderson, Eric Frank Russell and Isaac Asimov)
Michael Moorcock - Blood
Julian May - The Many Coloured Land / The Golden Torc Omnibus
Michael Scott Rohan - The Lord of Middle Air

Here's a photo of them



I have copies of the first four of these books already. I'll probably keep the Hyperion, as I have an A format not this larger edition and I like the cover, and the Moorcock as I have it in hardcover only and he's one of the authors I'm getting a little completest about.

The real pain was the one book I didn't previously own - the Michael Scott Rohan. Charity shops often put stickers on the covers of the books with prices on and they rarely use low tack stickers. this normally results in time having to be spent to carefully remove these stickers without damaging the book and then, often, removing the sticky residue they leave behind.


The only problem is that every now and again, no matter how much care I put into the removal of the sticker, one will rip the cover and yesterday it, annoyingly, happened on the only "new" to the collection title I bought. Here's a close up of the damage.


And the really annoying part. They didn't even need to put the sticker on it - all the books were exactly the same price. It would have been easier for them to just put a label on the shelf.

So if anyone is reading this who might be in a position to be stickering books in such a shop - don't. Think of the people who buy them. Some of us are collectors and want our books in as good condition as we can get them.
 

Comments

Unknown said…
In the shops (charity, second hand) I visit in Belgium. They write the price with a ballpen on the inside. No need to get rid of something annoying. Both of them are unfortunately a little trip away. One in Bruxelles the other is in Redu, one of the book villages. Both carry books in English :-)
24 January 2016 at 17:03
Edmund Lester said…
I can remember a second hand book shop near the Grand Place that I've visited a few times over the years. That had a reasonable range of books in English, even a number of old science fiction.

I bought several from there each time I visited
24 January 2016 at 17:54
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review of Ray Garton - Bestial

-
In horror movie-land sequels are pretty much a par for the course. You make a good horror film, it seems it only makes sense to go back and milk the idea a second time. In the world of horror books (note - not dark fantasy or paranormal romance, I mean HORROR) this has been less common. I'm not saying they don't exist - Graham Masterton's Manitou and James Herbert's Rats both started series - and sure you get books set in a repeated environs - take Gary Braunbeck's Cedar Hill short stories and novels, and Stephen King's version of Maine. But straight sequels, picking up the action from the end of the prior book or soon after, haven't filled the shelves in bookstores. I guess part of the reason for this is the rather final end that most horror books have. Zombies are destroyed, vampires staked, demons exorcised, witches burned etc, etc. Okay, Dracula can be resurrected over and over but mostly you get to the end and that's it. Recently though this seems ...
Read more

Review of Bill Bryson - Shakespeare: The World as a Stage

-
Although best known for his travel books this is far from Bryson's first venture into other fields. He has written the obligatory (for a writer) book of personal memoirs ("The Life and Time of the Thunderbolt Kid"), a book or two on the English language ("Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words") and even one on the sum total of human knowledge ("A Short History of Nearly Everything"). And now he has turned his hand to biography with this book on the greatest of all authors. This feels remarkably well researched - despite being such a short book he lists three and a half pages of selected bibliography. This amount of available research material does not mean, however, that much is actually known about Shakespeare life - far from it. Bryson even makes fun of this fact throughout the book. The book explains the few known facts of Shakespeare's life and how they are known - his birth (or rather his baptism, the exact date of his birth being infe...
Read more

A long time passed

-
I've not posted on here for quite some time - a little over a year. In truth I was not sure I was ever going to post on this blog again. As anyone knows who read my post from April last year I was diagnosed with depression and my personality changed a little. I stopped reading completely and cut back severely on my watching sf or horror. I just didn't have the interest. Well it's now more than 16 months since my diagnosis and I've still not read any fiction. I did start reading again although it's been non-fiction only. I've read my way through a number of science books including a great biography of Joseph Priestley, a fair few history books with the current one being a general all-encompassing history of Germany. Oh, and two great books by Simon Winchester. Screenwise I've watched little sf/horror, although seem to be working my way through Nordic Noir - a list of Crime films / TV series made in Scandanavia. (By the way, anyone who enjoys a goo...
Read more