Antiquarian Books Quotes

I like Victorian children's novels extremely a lot. If I would say I collect anything, that's what I'll hunt for now and again at old book stores.

Despite all the Internet has done to make prices transparent and bibliographic information universal, you can still find - at book sales and thrift shops, auctions and even fancy dealers - unrecognized or underpriced rarities. Getting something valuable for cheap is the basic, greedy thrill of book collecting.

In my home country, there was a little shop with old books, but it was really in the countryside. You couldn't find English books. I found this very avant-garde American art book that had information about Georgia O'Keeffe. I was very much impressed by her.

I've been a book collector since I was young, since I was a kid.

I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn't quite call me a rare-book collector. But I did once work in a rare-books library, and I wrote a novel about a rare book.

I’m rather apt to read old books than new.

Mr. Pewter led them through to a library, filled with thousands of antiquarian books. 'Impressive, eh?' 'Very,' said Jack. 'How did you amass all these?' 'Well,' said Pewter, 'You know the person who always borrows books and never gives them back?' 'Yes...?' 'I'm that person.

I collect books, primarily first-edition 20th-century fiction.

I've always spent money on books. I've always enjoyed handling books - the size, the format. I feel very strongly about original ephemera.

I had already done a lot of research for Rough Riders, keeping notebooks and old photographs. Some of the books were antiques for that time period, with the covers falling off.

My specialty as a collector is books that almost have value. When I love a book, I don't buy the first edition, because those have become incredibly expensive. But I might buy a beat-up copy of the second edition, third printing, which looks almost exactly the same as the first edition except that a couple of typos have been fixed.

Any given day, you'll find me at secondhand bookstores.

In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.

Your second-hand bookseller is second to none in the worth of the treasures he dispenses.

I know many older writers who were very successful and whose books are now out of print, so you have to go to antiquarian booksellers to buy their fifth or eighth novel or whatever it is.

I don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense.

It'll take a while for all those strange old books that I love to show up on digital: books that aren't current bestsellers but aren't public-domain freebies, either.

Book collectors are thrill-seekers. It is a vegetarian hunt to be sure, without much exertion or risk, but the endorphin rush of the chase and the adrenaline high of the capture are much the same with first editions as I imagine they must be in the pursuit of 10-point stags, largemouth bass, or 20-foot waves at Maverick's.

Old books exert a strange fascination for me -- their smell, their feel, their history; wondering who might have owned them, how they lived, what they felt.