book condition Quotes

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.

Madam Pince, our librarian, tells me that it is 'pawed about, dribbled on, and generally maltreated' nearly everyday - a high compliment for any book.

If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page.

Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books: the smell of small people clings to them.

Books for general reading always smell bad; the odor of common people hangs around them.

You can buy a book new, buy it in hardback or wait for the paperback, find it used or as a collectible. I don't mind. What I care about most is that people are reading.

There is no denying the aesthetics of a well-made, well-loved book.

The dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.

I preferred to hang out with the dead, dying, or desperate books - used we call them, in a way that we'd never call a person, unless we meant it cruelly

Recently while browsing in a secondhand bookstore I bought a paperback copy of The Intellectual and the City, but I was unable to read it. When I got home I discovered that the original owner had highlighted the entire book - literally. Every line on every page had been drawn through with a bright green Magic Marker. It was a terrifying example of a mind that had lost all power of discrimination.

The copies of The Catcher In The Rye or To Kill A Mockingbird that I own look like they were printed yesterday, and there's not a nick, not a blur, there's not any fading on the jacket at all, because they were taken and protected. A limited edition, by nature, is limited, and also probably more protected because of that. I'd rather have a first trade edition than a special one of 25 that was made years later, even if it's signed by the author. The trade edition is the Holy Grail.

Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs. These evil white scabs rip off with difficulty, leaving leprous wounds and traces of slime to which adhere the dust and fluff of ages, making me wish for a special gummy hell to which the inventor of these stickers would be condemned.

There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they're easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves.

It had that comfortably sprung, lived-in look that library books with a lively circulation always get; bent page corners, a dab of mustard on page 331, a whiff of some reader's spilled after-dinner whiskey on page 468. Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us, how good stories abide, unchanged and mutely wise, while we poor humans grow older and slower.

I still have my high school copy of the collected Poe - missing its covers and pretty worse for the wear.

I couldn't imagine anyone ever reading a book enough to make it look like that. It looked like it had been driven over by a school bus after someone had taken a bath with it.

It looked the sort of book described in library catalogues as 'slightly foxed,' although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had beed badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.